Future of NP

I'll be radical. Very radical. I think we might eventually separate the Nintendo Papercraft blog from the forums. I just still don't know how that might and will happen, since it all evolves naturally, akin to how a language evolves.

The Nintendo Papercraft blog is a collection. A museum.

PaperCraft Museum chose its name very well, because look at it: it's completely dead. And? Because of all its richness, PaperCraft Museum is still one of the most visited papercraft websites in the World Wide Web.

The same will happen to Nintendo Papercraft, if we don't find new blogposters and designers. Nintendo Papercraft will lock itself down. And yet, will it 'die'? No, as long as Drummyralf keeps paying the things he has to pay (and I even think it's automatized now).

So should we be worried that Nintendo Papercraft is producing less designs than it used to have? Of course not. The more there are designs on the blog, the less possibilities and ideas there are left for designers. We're not slaves from neither power nor money, since Nintendo Papercraft is 100% hobby-generated, therefore there is no problem with having no new content.

However, the bulletin board is another matter. It's a community.

With forums, members come and go. That's perfectly normal. However, a message board's quality can be measured by its 'retention', that is, the number of people who come and stay for a relatively long time. I think that Nintendo Papercraft is one of the most successful papercraft forums when it comes to retention. Some early members are still lurking around! And most people get to know each other, albeit under nicknames.

The more I look at the Nintendo Papercraft forums and the less I see the relevance of Nintendo and/or even Papercraft in it. We're having an identity crisis. We discuss about video games way more than we discuss about papercraft. The only designer here is Sabi96, and he's mostly into Disney paper models now. We discuss about How to Train Your Dragon and about Mockingjay in the Chat Topic.

But the question is, does it really matter? NOT AT ALL. The Nintendo Papercraft forums became famous naturally and it will have to evolve naturally. We can't force visitors to join the forums. We can't force members to stop goofing and testbuild and design and release models. I tried that several times and it just doesn't work.

However, what /does/ work are incentives. If we post lots and loads and truckloads of off-topic content but look happy and interesting and partying, visitors will be interested in joining. If we organize awesome contests with prizes and a lot of suspense, people will be interested and will want to get in. If we set up multiplayer tournaments (with or without prizes) and have a s**tload of fun, people will come. Goofing /is/ the norm. Moderation and rules are only there to make it go at the right place.

And not having enough members is not an excuse. It's all about retention. We /need/ a gaming tournament to happen, whatever the number of participants. If we have fun just once, we will want to do it again. That's how we keep members active.

And about SONY Papercraft, I don't find that ridicule. Remember how PaperPokés started? We were even sharing a single bulletin board for two different papercraft blogs! It all comes down to interest. And after all, there are not a lot of SONY papercrafts out there, so that would be quite easy and quick to set up a beautiful blog, just like I'm doing with Star Wars PaperCraft... ;-)

We're a community, not a brand. I created the Papercraft Wiki with that exact idea in my head: I put no direct reference to Nintendo Papercraft on the pages. In fact, I even plan to link to it on my SW Papercraft blog... What matters is to be ourselves and to enjoy our time here.

TL;DR: As long as one keeps paying things (and buying prizes), we can keep doing whatever we want.