When Portal 1 came out, we had a pretty fucking spectacular explosion of popularity right after release. Portal was popular, Hammer is pretty relatively easy to get in to, so we had lots of people vising and making and uploading and playing maps.
Then after maybe, pfft, 6 months or so, traffic started waning pretty rapidly. But what did anyone expect? Portal 1 was a single player only puzzle game with maybe a couple hours of gameplay. It had zero official support added, a broken map importer, and puzzle elements which were difficult for non-experienced mappers to get a grasp of.
People shifted away from the site because people were shifting away from Portal in general. If I had to guess, less than 10% of a game's total players will seek out custom maps and most of the people who do tend not to stick around for any extended period of time. They play 1 or 2 maps and they had their fill. We created things like the Community Spotlight to give these short term visitors a place to go so they find the top-tier content. Because nothing is going to turn a casual gamer off to the notion of playing custom maps faster than if the first map they play is garbage.
So, 6 months or maybe a year after Portal 1 came out, site traffic was low and people said shit like "TWP is dead" as if I or anyone else wasn't doing more to keep the site active. Of course the site wasn't active then, barely anyone gave a shit about a single player only puzzle game. That's like expecting people to play the same 30 crossword puzzles every day for a year straight and still enjoy them. The site losing traffic was to be expected.
Well fast forward a couple of years and Portal 2 gets announced. I spruce up the site and prepare for another huge influx of visitors, traffic, uploads and players, and that's exactly what we got. In the beginning when Portal 2 first came out, shit was crazy. We were running something like 3,000 downloads an hour. I had to open up a cloud hosting service for maps just to keep the site online. Do any of you remember the site being unbearably slow the first few days after release? That's why.
We have our summer content and it was fantastic. But, just like with Portal 1, lack of official support and the fact that Portal is a puzzle game meant that players were dropping off pretty quickly again. Valve managed to maintain some semblance of support for the game, we got additional content from the DLCs which was nice, and we always got a pop of new visitors and map downloads when that happens.
But it is only temporary. People move on. Gamers don't stick to a single game for YEARS without something keeping them there, and like it or not, puzzle games do not have the sort of draw that something like TF2 or Dota or anything like that ever will. There is no appeal for people to play the same puzzles on a daily basis.
A few months ago we were talking with the staff here, how people like Nacimota have shuffled on to other things. The new kids thought this was weird, that a trusted staff member would just not be present anymore and that's okay by me. But again I ask the question: what else did you really expect?
It bothers me when people say this site is "dead", and make these outlandish claims that there will be some sort of resurgence for some magical reason. There won't. Nobody is going to blame anyone for wanting to move on to newer things. It's totally fine; it's part of the cycle. The only thing that is going to resurge traffic is a new major DLC, or Portal 3. Both of those are unlikely to happen.
But you know what? When Portal 3 gets announced, TWP will still be here. We'll still be hosting maps. We'll still be providing a community - the only community - for Portal mappers. The site isn't "dead", this is just the natural ebb and flow of how gaming sites work.
I think it could be done more to bring the rest here! I remember the communnity roundup with a certain nostalgia, and I think that it really provided the site with a great dynamism and spectation. I remember myself running to log in to check out the roundup at the beginning of each month and read the comments on the latest maps and news! I guess it's needed someone with spare time enough to commit this task (I wish I had... cause I'd offer myself!), but I really think this must be brought back again. This and whatever other periodic article that bring continuous freshness and dynamism to the site.
So, many of us just do this because we really like it, although it's true that we need some incentive, at least some good comments and feedback, or a good rating; this is what keeps us there, not necessarily a contest. I believe that a roundup or something similar could be stimulating and interesting enough to keep mappers mapping and posting new maps... and ppl to come here to check out continually.
), and I do think Portal puzzles have not been yet discovered entirely... this is not playing over and over again to the same stuff, there are even new mechanics being discovered still... and good maps to be done.
