Quote:
Originally Posted by callipygian
Not to be impertinent, but how old are you?
The early 2000s were quite possibly the golden age of online entertainment. The Internet was mature enough to technologically support most of what people wanted to do but nobody had made a massive push to make money off of it yet.
All sorts of online casinos proliferated - I remember learning poker with my friends on Yahoo Games. People routinely exchanged games, movies, and music on Napster or Kazaa. Nobody signed up for sites with their real names.
None of this was mobile, granted, but it was a great time for online entertainment.
Granted, I don't have data to support this, but I'd have to imagine that the amount of time spent "online" in 2004 by an 18-30 year old is a fraction of what he or she now spends on his or her phone or other mobile devices. People played poker online because they were online, plus the coverage was all over ESPN, which - again, I don't have data to back this up, but feel pretty confident in my position - likely had far, far more live TV viewers back then from that demographic than they do today.
Poker today is an afterthought to 18-30 year-olds, if even a thought at all. And that afterthought is sort of like the way every successive generation views what was popular with the previous generation - a combination of puzzlement and derision, or certainly not a rush to emulate what was hot back in the day. Sure - maybe someday there will be nostalgia for poker like there seems to be for things that were big back in the day, but considering the nostalgia movement these days is the 90s, that means about ten years of waiting for the poker wave to hit again.
Of course if it becomes legal in the US soon, all bets are off, yet even still you can count me among those who wonders if it will ever go back to the levels it once was. Most 18-30 year olds would be more lured in these days by Fortnite tournaments (and the like) than poker, I'd have to think.