What do you think about this goal?
Is it even possible to achieve?
Regardless of the scale, what needs to be done to increase the Go population, and what are the bottlenecks?
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Is it time for the annual rediscussion of this topic? 
Well, nothing really changed all the past years in that regard, so the solution more-or-less remains the same and is still unattainable.
Three things are needed to overcome the competition of other board games and the competion of the other mediums (physical sports and flashy online gaming and games with graphics/action) and turn the game into a âreknown gameâ in new markets:
â Money
â Fame
â Good, centralised/concerted organisation to have a coherent marketing plan by using the aforementioned money and fame to generate more of both.
We have none of those things, so I guess we can reconsider the issue next year, when we will still have none of those things, but we will all be one year older.
Till then Iâd like to say that we could add another thing that we are missing: ârealistic goalsââŠ
Really? a tenfold increase? What is that fellow selling? âGo themed cryptoâ? 
If he even brings in ten more new people it would be a success⊠tenfold increase, lolâŠ
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60 million is already huge, that represents almost 1% of the world population. But things could improve in the West, and even in Asia, Xiangqi is about three times more popular. To increase the go population, we would need
- A popular Netflix series featuring go
- charismatic/attractive influencers
- scandals that get a lot of media coverage.
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When I saw these two topics next to each other, I had to smile:
Pairing people with similar strength would be a start I guess.
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Have we considered adding beginner-friendly features, like checkmate?
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Capture Go is probably the closest we can get
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A Go club I used to frequent originally met in a secret little hall. Eventually they changed to meet in the public library - more space and free. It was quite common for passers-by to be drawn in out of curiosity to watch, and occasionally play. Similarly, I recall a Go Magic video where Vadim visited South Korea - heaps of players in the park. How could you not be curious?
Getting new players is somewhat easy I suspect, keeping them is tricky.
Edit to add: For regular Go players, your feeds and subscriptions cause Go to appear highly visible to you. Itâs easy to forget that for most people, they simply donât see the game.
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in order to increase a population to a topic media is the strongest way, so events should advertise on radios, the topic (go in this case) needs to become something seen often in movies (ie more animations, more in the news on tv). it needs to extend itâs voice from forums that talk about go with current go players, to those that do not know of the game. it should be played in public places, like malls, parks and even in the streets. lets take a lesson from the voting system, and make memes containing go contents. (ie trump playing go and someone snap backed him so he is mad⊠to make people think wow go is fun!) all in all the concept can be announced in many more ways that can reach the populous that does not know go.
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We had the same experience in a small go club that met every Saturday afternoon in a local library. Lots of passersby showed casual interest in our games, and a few grade-school kids were seriously interested, with a couple coming back the next week to play. However, they were dependent on their mothers bringing them to the library, and that just wasnât sustained. A formal club with some publicity help from the library is probably needed to make the experience into a habit.
Similarly, middle schools and high school in the U.S. commonly have chess clubs. Such clubs usually need a teacher host who is usually the person who founded the club. So, any go players who teach in American schools could help by starting a club.
Schools, especially at the elementary level, are often open to educational presentations. My local rock club has a formal outreach program of presentations in the schools that has been very successful. In addition, I arranged with my daughterâs first-grade teacher to give a one-hour presentation about minerals in her class. This was hands-on, touching allowed, with many specimens from my collection. The kids were tremendously excited about it, and five years later, at my daughterâs birthday party, one of her friends thanked me again for stimulating her interest in geology.
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If you want to develop a go club you have to be interested in the kids teaching. Honestly this is something rare between adults. Who wants to go animate a school activity like twice every week? Every, no failure. Harder as what it looks. Better be two, so you can alternate.
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And a new post on reddit almost just a step further than Capture Go.
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I think probably it doesnât make sense to be too fussed about how many people play go. In the next 5-10 years the Western go-playing population could be cut in half or it could double, and most people who really enjoy go now will still really enjoy go just the same amount regardless.
People trying to make money from the âgo industryâ have every reason to care, of course, since each player is a potential customer / subscriber / whatever, but itâs worse than useless to try to come up with a strategy for them. The best way to make sure a businessman completely ignores a marketing strategy is to give it away for free.
As China undergoes the same economic and social trajectory as Japan and Korea (i.e. more access to high-quality video games, more high-salary careers for smart people), and as CJK all undergo very sharp population decline, the global population of go players is almost certain to decline.
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I think the size of the western playing Go population makes a big difference for people who want to play Go IRL.
Even just within friendship groups itâs almost certain youâd have a friend who knows how to play chess, so you can have a casual game with them if you fancy. Although several of my friends play chess, none play Go.
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I was on the verge of being one of these businessmen at the start of the year, but itâs becoming more of a side project. When I finally release my review/tsumego apps theyâll be side projects for my own improvement that I just happen to be able to share with the community. I only need enough to offset server and database costs, I donât even want to think about making a profit at this point â there are far more lucrative markets and ideas for me to work on to pay the bills.
I donât care how popular Go is, for me itâll always be a personal challenge on breaking past plateaus and mental barriers. Go is also the father of all strategy games so as long as Iâm interested in strategy games like League of Legends, Iâll be interested in Go.
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If you want to go towards a âquestionably moral wayâ, you can create a âfake news marketing campaignâ about some mega-rich fellow that goes around giving interviews about the benefits of Go. The NVidia CEO (Jensen Huang) could be a good choice, since he is of eastern asian descent and any AI-generated images of him playing Go will be easier to be generated and he is partially responsible for the âAI-slopâ era anyway, so it is a bit ironic.
Therefore, you could with minimal effort and money, theoretically create a whole âAI-slopâ campaign with titles like:
â âThe ancient game behind NVidia CEOâs successâ
â âJensen Huang: Baduk changed my life. What YOU can learn from it, as well.â
â âFrom zero to hero. Jensen Huang, how Go tought me everythingâ and generate articles on various media with him playing Go
Eventually the AI-slop of the âmore conventional mediaâ will pick up the whole story (a lot of them are now automated slop anyway) and might start to circulate the story on their own websites for free and soon enough you might have real interviewers asking Jensen Huang in interviews about âhis great experience at playing Goâ.
It is my understanding that such a marketing campaign is not illegal in the USA, but it is highly immoral since it is based on lies, therefore I do not condone of such an idea.
Very very true.
This is why I said earlier that a âcentral marketing strategyâ is needed⊠every one of us here has an idea and some have actually put time and money towards it, but nothing really happens because none of us is âthe big pictureâ and there is no concerted effort to contact all those individuals and interact with them, combine their projects/ideas/platforms or their servers, brainstorm on having a centralised approach and so forth.
Other people say âplay 9x9 firstâ, others say âplay capture Goâ, that fellow on reddit has his website and says âplay Stones firstâ, others say âstart with easy problems/tsumegoâ, others say ânah, head straight for 19x19 with handicapâ, others say âhandicap sucks, go reverse komiâ and so on and so and so on⊠
There is one thing everyone agrees with, that âthe earlier someone is taught Go, the betterâ, so everyone agrees that schools and kids are the ideal âtarget groupâ for growing the Go playerbase.
â What do kids tend to not know early on? Foreign languages in sufficient capacity to study the foreign text.
â Therefore what is it that you need to teach the game to kids? Books and materials in their native language.
Ah, who has a project like that? I do.
How much does it cost? Nothing.
Youâd think that most non-english Go associations who do not have an already expanded playerbase and their own teaching materials would jump at the opportunity of having a âfree teaching bookâ they can give to their students, at no cost and no copyright issues, right?
Well, you would, but Iâve yet to hear from anyone like that.
It is just ârandom Go enthusiastsâ (which is what I am, as well) that have come along and helped with the translations.
The National Go associations? Nothing.
I practically send them messages to inform them about the book being slowly available in their language and they do not even bother to tick âthumbs upâ and leave me on âreadâ.
Do I bother them? Do they not care? Do they not like the book? I do not know. I do not recall ever getting any feedback from the âofficialsâ, in the 7 years of my projectâs public existence.
Random people that have found and read my book in their language have told me that it has helped them a lot, personally and in teaching the game to others. The National Go Associations have provided no feedback. I havenât even heard anything from EGF, either⊠the occassional articles they have on my project? Iâve actually written them myself. It was âsuch a botherâ to them, they even gave me access so I could upload them myself, so that they wouldnât lose any of their time with this.
Similarly, none of the book-selling Go sites have offered to host the various translated versions of the book. Iâve sent messages to quite a few of them where I offered to print and ship them physical copies of the book on my own expenses and the only one that deemed to answer me, actually asked me to pay him, per book, to distribute the books that I was already offering to give him for free. 
This is why I predict that we will still have the same discussion next year, with the same contents, because we have the same situation that we have always been, now.
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Wow, you are an optimist with your âthe same discussion next yearâ.
Next decade, next century, next millennium is maybe more realistic.
Most people on forums (whatever subject you can think of) love to vent their opinions. Love to hear themselves talk. But that is all. Making plans of how to reach a specific goal hardly ever happens. The same goes for executing that plan. Showing willingness to actually help is rare.Words without action or commitment.
And to be honest: I am one of them. Sorry.
@JethOrensin : I got to give you credit for your multilingual go boek project.
Bravo.
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Well, I could have been really optimistic and said that weâd have the same discussion in the next six months.
But it is true, there is such a topic every year, unfortunately, and with the same content and result.
The only thing that does change is that each year some Go platforms/services go down and get abandoned while some others rise up with claims of âincreasing the Go playerbaseâ and âfinally offering what was missing in promoting/teaching Goâ, while in practice they just divide the already existing âpieâ even more.
I am not sure if the slow influx of new players vs the slow outgoing of older players (due to various real life obligations or old age) is negative or positive, so I have no opinion on what type of change happens there, if any.
Whether that affects the economic ecosystem of the Go market is also unknown.
On the one hand older players tend to have more money so they can pay for lessons for themselves or their children, while newer players tend to have less money and more enthusiasm to learn on their own.
Therefore I have no opinion on that either, but if there was any significant improvement in the âGo marketâ I imagine that it would have been noticeable.
I do know that I have never paid for any Go teachers/courses in my life and I wonât do that unless I finally put in the time and actually study the game books Iâve already bought and reach the full potential that I can achieve on my own studious merit. But thatâs just my own personal preference.
If I am not mistaken you are the one that has provided me with the first draft of the full Dutch translation (which I have, shamefully, yet to typeset and provide you the first draft - sorry about that. I have gotten a bit swamped and burned out from overworking myself in the past months 
), so as far as I know, you have helped quite a bit.
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Take good care of yourself. I have seen people get burned out and it took them years to recover. Whatever you do, it is just not worth it.
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