Super302/Soup

Good vibes ahead :) I've been feeling really positive about the puzzle game community & my own lil' corner of it. Theres always going to be drama & situations & incidents & problems in any community, and we've seen a lot of friendly faces exit our landscape this year... but I think that for the first time in a long time, our neck of the woods is mostly peaceful and healthy. We're learning to better deal with the serious stuff without the damaging fallouts, and while we have our scars, I know & see that community leaders are successfully moderating their spaces and things are safer than ever on the backend. For years, we've been mostly starved of game content, IRL & online events & competition, and ongoing social media activity. But towards the end 2026, I've realized that trend has kinda been bucked! Theres so many creative & driven minds active and hosting events right now - TWS, Galactic, PKGB, TECWC, even our mates over in the Classic Tetris community are ramping things up. I'm very proud of my fellow creators, organizers, and friends for their execution on these types of projects - to me, this is the most legitimate our scene has felt as an eSport since I got into Tetris. That sense of competitive culture is stronger and more complex, I guess you could say. There's a notable uptick in LAN events & meetups taking place around the globe (including in my own country!), more passion projects & resources being worked on, and I'm seeing a few more new faces take interest in content creation & streaming centred around our flagship titles. Even the public discussions I've been taking part in have been more proactive & fun, and discord servers of all topics and sizes have felt more active as of late. I'm not sure if any of this lines up with a quantifiable trend, but things feel alive. I'm not claiming we're in some renaissance or whatever, because theres still lots to do and fix. In terms of gameplay & game content, you can make the argument that things are a little stale, but everyones making do with what we have and its beautiful. Everything I've said are signs that the stacker game scene & Tetris community has got good vitals, and I haven't really felt that vibe since my early days of being a part of it. Alongside all this, my own slice of this niche has been going wonderfully! Every day, I get comments on my videos from players expressing motivation and excitement about getting into stacker games! I recently crossed 40 MILLION views across all of my platforms, my Twitchs follower base and viewership is rapidly growing, and as of this week I've brought on 2 new editors to help with making my short form videos even better AND to get into some brilliant long form videos! I hope to support the communities surge of passion and productivity with my silly little videos <3 So what do you all think? I'd love to know if I'm the only person whos feeling this shift in a positive direction. Do y'all share this positive outlook, or disagree and have ideas on where we can continue to improve? Feel free to share your own thoughts and feelings on the Tetris/stacker game/puzzle game community as of late! Have a good one, legends :)