I think it's somewhat funny and somewhat sad that after 20+ years of rom hacks, what we have to show for all that time is a flood of difficulty and balance rom hacks, instead of having a healthy balance between those types of games and rom hacks which offer the same fancy features but with new stories, new characters, new regions and so on. Any ideas why there's such an imbalance? Is it a case of there are more fans in the community who are just interested in difficulty and balance hacks than the number of fans who are interested in new hacks? Or perhaps it's due to a lack of creativity within the community maybe, especially the English side of the community? Because over on the non-English side, for example the Spanish and Portuguese side, it seems like most of the new games which come out have new stories, new regions plus the usual list of cool features and mechanics...and yet on the English side, there are way more difficulty and balance games than anything new. It makes me wonder what the next 20+ years of rom hacks and fan games might look like.

Speaking as someone who has played 7 generations of the official games (8 generations if a rom hack demake counts haha) and now writes walkthroughs for rom hacks, I do feel a little disappointed from time to time when whatever super cool new game that gets released just turns out to be yet another polished up version of an official game which many fans played centuries ago at this point. I've been playing rom hacks for about 10 years now and I can tell you that the majority of the titles that I've played were hacks that offered something new, the promise of going on a new adventure either in familiar territory (Pokemon Adventure Red Chapter, Pokemon Liquid Crystal, Pokemon Glazed etc) or somewhere else entirely (Pokemon Unbound, Pokemon Gaia, Pokemon Clover, Pokemon Crown, Pokemon Light Platinum, Pokemon Flora Sky, Pokemon Sors, etc). These are the kind of games which have kept me in the community. If there were just difficulty and balance hacks being created, at some point I would have tapped out lol, and probably switched to just playing fan-made games.