With new ability to create (possibly) more professional and polished looking films (that is, no game quirks to deal with as in TS2), there’s no telling what kind of doors will be opened for really talented creators. Perhaps most importantly, this new game will potentially bring a whole new level of exposure to machinima. …Unfortunately, it will likely also, as you suggest bllius, lead to an absolute avalanche of less than stellar productions.

I’m anxious to see how well the game actually comes out (still has some kinks and limits), as well as what happens to the industry in the future. I’ve often longed for EA to release a similarly dedicated movies-only version of The Sims, so we’ll see if this inspires them any…

In fact I predict it will lead to such a deluge of machinima that it will become difficult to find the true ‘gems’ out there.

As to why it hasn’t exploded in popularity, firstly the term “machinima” hasn’t been around for a decade, more like seven years since it was first coined, in a community which had - at best - numbers in the low hundreds of people. Compare this to the term “blog”, which was indeed coined ten years ago and is only rising to a larger popular awareness in the past two or three years. Or the term “demoscene”… a movement which has been around for twenty years, and you’ll find no one uninitiated who knows what it is.

But back to machinima. During that seven years since the term was first coined, awareness HAS been growing. Especially in the past year or so, we’ve seen more press mention of the term than ever before, in major publications. And while not all of this coverage does it justice, it’s coverage. People’s awareness IS growing, now more than ever before. In my opinion, it is impossible to be credibly pessimistic about the state of the world’s awareness of machinima if one has been paying attention to what has been happening in the past 12 months in particular.

As for why more machinima isn’t in major festivals, television, cinemas… it has NOTHING to do with technical limitations, and everything to do with filmmakers not owning their movies. ANY venue which can be considered commercial is off the table if you don’t own 100% of your film. That rules out movie theaters and television. I’ve been approached by two movie theater organizations and seven television stations in the past year, wanting badly to show my material and other films like it… and I can’t let them because of the EULA. This is the situation that 99.9% of machinima makers would be in were they approached with similar offers. EVEN IF I STAND TO MAKE NO MONEY MYSELF, the venue is commercial and therefore it is out, or at the least very VERY difficult to get permission. Many have tried, few have succeeded.

It’s not a matter of wanting to grow up or not. It’s a matter of the fact that if we tear machinima from its roots in order to gain freedom, machinima loses MANY of its advantages regarding production pipeline. If 100% custom content is required, then some are eliminated due to lack of skillset, others due to lack of time. And if one is only doing this for fun anyway (applies to vast majority of machinima makers), then what is one’s incentive to make one’s job much much harder?

There is no mystery. Machinima has the cement shoes of others’ intellectual property rights, and she won’t fly as long as she wears them. And many find those shoes comfortable enough to live with, so the number of people working with their pickaxes is a very small number.

Interesting that news volume spiked in 2005.
You can also do silly things like comparisons:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=second+life%2C+world+of+warcraft%2C+machinima

The idea that machinima is dead is crazy talk.

Life is tough on the tip of the spear.

And thanks for the link to the Rooster Teeth Forum, Coyote’s comments there is worth reading through some otherwise meandering pap.