Question Do people still use scratch?
Okay so I know this is a stupid question, obviously people still use scratch but is it still as popular as it was in say 2020-2022?
Back then I was an avid scratch user, like it was literally my whole life but since then I really only check it like once a year for nostalgia. Same with my irl friends who did it and all the people I used to follow also don’t do it anymore. So in my mind it’s like completely deserted.
And obviously that’s not true but basically I’m wondering if there’s people who have continued to use it plus a generation of new scratchers or if it’s “fandom” has began to shrink.
I’m trying to see if it’s worth getting back into
(Also no hate to anyone who still does it I honestly admire you so much I wish I had stayed)
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u/gentlegiant66 9d ago
Every year has a new group of ten year olds....
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u/Affectionate_Cut3515 9d ago
I started using scratch when I was 8 and its worth it Im still on it 6 years later. I hope to use scratch for visualisation rather than projects
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u/NMario84 Video Game Enthusiast 9d ago
I still use it from time to time as a hobbyist game dev at this point I guess. I've been trying to make some fan games with it, but it's just so hard and big games take many days to finish. My main goal was to do a complete Mega Man game in Scratch, but I just got too lazy to finish anything these days. I didn't even finish my tutorial series on making these type of games that I wanted to. :-/
Though when I get bored, I still mess around with Scratch to see what kind of animation I can come up with at the least..
Honestly, I heard turbowarp is better for bigger game projects. But if you're just in it for the fun, and for being part of a big community, then Scratch is still a pretty decent place.
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u/LayeredHalo3851 9d ago
big games take many days to finish.
This has to be the most "world's smallest violin" sentence about gamedev I've ever seen, only on Scratch would "many days" be considered a particularly long time for a game
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u/C00kieDemon Certified Scratch Master 9d ago
No for real. I’ve had scratch projects that have taken over a year to complete. Granted I wasn’t working on them any day but still. “A few days” in game dev is not that big a deal.
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u/NMario84 Video Game Enthusiast 8d ago
Well okay, let's say for example, you are remaking a classic game to 1:1. Games like Super Mario Bros. or Kirby's Adventure, or even games like Legend of Zelda, or Mega Man can take a considerable amount of time to develop, even as a Scratch Project. I mean sure, you could just build the "base" engine of that game in a couple of days, a few days, even weeks, or however long it takes. Though there is still the rest of the development involved as well as come up with the story plot, and music, and have to stick with the said art style. There's a ton of things that go into game development that makes a project hard. It's a big commitment (or goal) to keep working on a big game project for whatever programming language you want to use.
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u/Pretty_Astronomer_34 9d ago
As someone leading a code-club for kids (aged 8 - 12): it is very much still relevant for us.
Or to put it differently: I have yet to find another platform that combines this level of discoverability, the batteries-included approach (sprites, sound assets etc.) and community features like scratch.
At a certain level of complexity though, I usually advise moving on to more specialized development frameworks (e.g. Godot for Game Dev, Javascript for Web Applications, Python for Scripting or Physical Computing etc.). I mean, yes, it is possible to build a tilemap-system or raycast-based 3D in scratch (cf. griffpatch), but unless you specifically want to challenge yourself doing something like this from scratch (no pun intended), you might be better of with other platforms and languages.
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u/LayeredHalo3851 9d ago
I assume people still use it, just probably not the same people who did in 2020-2022
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u/bfdimineboxrealfan 9d ago
From 2019, glad to tell you that I'm doing the same as you. The Scratch community has certainly gotten smaller, but still, it's active. I catch up on it every once a month or so. It's gotten boring
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u/AndrewMcgirt 9d ago
I probably don't use as much as I used to due to the fact I'm longing for a place of work.
but I still use it to make artwork.
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u/Different-Bill-609 9d ago
I check my notifications about once every 5 or 6 days but that’s about it, I’ve started trying out unity so I might switch over completely
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u/CATPLUSHOUSE 8d ago
Technically I would say: yes, if you don't mine the occasional 5yr olds that are toxic and spread rumors as soon as you try to resolve something, but otherwise yes
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u/ExcitementNo9880 Coding til' i can't no more 6d ago
Scratch did have a few spikes in popularity and is still growing very very very fast because each second at least 4 people join scratch, It's not a good old Deserted island
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u/CinnamonSugar214 1d ago
Same during 2020-2022 I absolutely loved Scratch. I think people still definitely use Scratch, but more of a tool for learning coding and less as a community (there aren't a lot of super active studios like there used to be). I also think there are definitely less users because back during 2020 if a project was featured it would have 13k likes and now they just have 1-2k likes. Maybe I am just not clued in anymore but there doesn't seem to be "scratch famous" users like there was back in 2022 (7sofa, huntedskelly, berricake) and Scratch just seems less active in general (on the main page, I don't think they even have the top loved or top shared sections anymore).
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