How many people play Angband?

[BlueFish]

How many people do you think have played angband at least once in the last month?

Are there any statistics about this, or evidence from which guesses could be made?

[Djabanete]

Quite a lot --- probably at LEAST 10 or 15 people.

Honestly? No idea.

[Storm-Sky]

Well the forum say's theres over 200 or so active members, probably half play variants, but then you have to think about all the people who play the game that might not be aware of this forum, and download the game from alternate gaming sites that advertise it. You have to think angband has been around a long time and I'm sure a lot of people, particulary university students have a copy somewhere.

[UglySquirrell]

You can also play it on android, its been available from the marketplace for quite a while. I'm guessing that will get a lot of people hooked.

[d_m]

My sense is that the set of people playing Angband on any given day is larger than we'd think (lots of people still play e.g. 3.0.9b), and I think even more people play periodically (e.g. pick Angband up once a month or once a year).

I'm not sure how many of these people visit rephial or oook though. Maybe we should take a page from DarkGod and include a network client in Angband that can report stats and upload high-scores/savefiles (if the user wants these).

EDIT: And I agree that there are probably lots of new Android players thanks to david3x3x3 and co

[Jazerus]

I noticed recently that Ubuntu's software center still downloads Angband 3.1.2 rather than 3.3. Is that something fixable on your end?

[fizzix]

Originally Posted by d_m

I'm not sure how many of these people visit rephial or oook though. Maybe we should take a page from DarkGod and include a network client in Angband that can report stats and upload high-scores/savefiles (if the user wants these).

Even though I'd like to know this information, I'm not really a fan of 'spying' on users even in a seemingly innocuous way. What I'd be ok with is logging the number of times Angband is downloaded from rephial. That'll give us a feel for the number of new or updating players, and that's useful.

[Derakon]

You could also include a registration app that is downloaded alongside Vanilla, which users can use if they want to let us know that they're playing it.

But given that we have no plan for that information, I doubt it's worth the effort.

[Magnate]

Originally Posted by Jazerus

I noticed recently that Ubuntu's software center still downloads Angband 3.1.2 rather than 3.3. Is that something fixable on your end?

Sort of. Ubuntu get (most of) their packages from Debian, and 3.2.0 was uploaded to Debian a month or two ago, so it will be available in the next release of Ubuntu (next month, IIUC). 3.3 is not yet packaged for Debian - I started work on 3.3.1 and realised it had a nasty bug, so I'm going to wait and package 3.3.2 instead. That will hopefully be uploaded in Oct/Nov and will then arrive in Ubuntu a few months later.

[awldune]

Originally Posted by d_m

I think even more people play periodically (e.g. pick Angband up once a month or once a year).

I suspect this describes a LOT of Angband players. I'll play quite a lot for a little while and then go away for a year or two and then come back. Been like that since 1994 or so.