Survey: ROM Hacking Involvement Survey

[Anthroyd]

Hey there, just a two question survey for you all.
I'm curious as to the split between people who make ROM hacks, vs people who play ROM hacks. :)

To the survey:
https://forms.gle/XAKjnKXdoy7ygs4s7

I'll post the compiled results in the coming days.
Thanks.

RESULTS: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1eqAO8vhkhl-wAbc9o0g0pWqIZ44ilvYrdzBtkl526tk/viewanalytics

I posted the survey to as many ROM hacking areas as possible, including a few diverse Discord channels, pokecommunity.com, and the /r/PokemonROMhacks subreddit.
This was to eliminate as much response bias as possible, as well as to get as many people to respond as possible. The total response number was 122.

The "hacking experience" responses mainly indicate that most people who are ROM hacking either:
(1) Have only dabbled in the scene, or
(2) Know the basics and trying to build their skills through making a project of their own.

A surprising 1/3 of respondents have never tried their hand at ROM hacking, which seemed to have mainly stemmed from the /r/PokemonROMhacks subreddit community responses.
The number of more advanced hackers was relatively small, being less than 1/5 of respondents.

The "playing experience" responses indicate a surprising ~2/3 of respondents claiming to be avid hack players.
1/3 of respondents claim to not play hacks very often, but have at least played a few in the past.

Overall, I was surprised to see that so many people still enjoy playing hacks on a regular basis, and that the number of people who consider themselves "veterans" or more advanced is so low in my perspective.

Thanks for taking part! I'll probably send out more surveys in the near future.

 

[Anthroyd]

I'll be closing submissions tonight at 11:59 CDT.
Please take 30 seconds to fill it out if you haven't already! ^_^

 

[Anthroyd]

The results to the survey have been released, and are reflected in the original post ^^^

 

[miksy91]

Hey there, just a two question survey for you all.
I'm curious as to the split between people who make ROM hacks, vs people who play ROM hacks. :)

I might have interpreted the survey wrong, but I thought you were planning to create a survey in order to find the correlation between people who make rom hacks, and those who play them. Given the survey was about answering both these questions, it would be possible to plot the results in a 2D grid where axises would indicate involvement in playing rom hacks, and creating them / doing rom hacking related research.
If the answers were plotted into this grid, it might show a cluster of people belonging to those who mostly play rom hacks but haven't been doing any rom hacking themselves, clusters of those who mostly create them (and don't really play hacks) and small clusters in between. Or perhaps the figure would be somehow different. It's hard to tell exactly.

Either way, this was a nice survey although the results aren't being used at their fullest potential (yet)

P.S
The selection of words in the questionnaire may also create small bias to the outcome. For example, the last option in "rom hacking experience" related question was about the person seeing themselves as a legend on the hacking scene. I wouldn't imagine anyone seeing themselves as a legend even if they had a long experience with rom hacking, software development and such in general (unless they're "elitists" that is).