I don't really view Smogon and VGC as competition. Smogon is what a person who plays the games would more see as aligned with their idea of a competitive Pokemon would look like, with it being 6v6 Singles. VGC is the official format and uses a playstyle that is shown to the player about three times a playthrough. On top of that, almost every difficulty hack is based on Smogon rather than VGC, with difficulty hacks based on doubles being rare. I think Radical Red singlehandedly got a lot of people to try Smogon, for instance.
If anyone cares, my analysis of VGC getting more popular is because the gimmicks of the last two games were more designed for it, and because the Youtube marketing has worked well for it. WolfeyVGC cracks like a million views a video, and I don't think that trend is separated. I also think VGC scene has a stronger sense of winning and losing in a capital e Event. A lot of Smogon tournaments are playing every week for several weeks and team tournaments means that there is less "This One Player Is The Winner, The Best", which is something that is extremely effective in Youtube marketing. I mean, PokemonChallenges basically just made up being the best Nuzlocker in the world and became super popular. The fact that teambuilding is usually one team for one event I imagine also adds to the ability to turn it into a marketable video; tournament post-mortems are something that are really popular.
The growth of VGC numbers on Smogon is people coming from Youtubers, but it's not Smogon players becoming VGC players, mostly. Smogon wouldn't have survived if it didn't have the fundamental fact that it's more aligned with what people see Pokemon as in their heads as a competitive game. The fact VGC is on the same website is actually more advertising for Smogon and at the minimum is more likely to get said people who tried the game from Youtube videos/social media to give Smogon a chance.
TLDR: No, VGC is not taking Smogon players away lol, and its growth is not decreasing Smogon growth. What's decreasing Smogon growth is two generations in a row that a lot of people did not jive with. SWSH's focus on Balance wars with HDB Regen turned off a lot of people, and Tera turned a lot of people off with SV. Other Smogon tiers like oldgens are healthy, so I disagree that the numbers even support some shift to VGC.
genuinely what good does it do to come to the ou thread every few months to make a big stink about how awful the SV ou meta is because of the tera Boogeyman while people are clearly trying to develop it into a more stable place through continued testing and discussion, the whole numbers argument is just a bunch of hooey. There could be a large variety of factors of why that is (oldgen popularity especially gens 1 and 3, VGC increasing in popularity, general disappointment w the franchise unrelated to comp, or a myriad of different things) we simply don't know and to insist it's because of the tera bogeyman is just absurd and a misleading argument. Genuinely what good does it do to just stink up the thread like this if you think "nothing is ever gonna be done about it anyways ".
edit: also natdex lmao it's also kinda split the OU playerbase
Stinking up the thread is when you write longer posts than like 80% of the one liner shit that's usually here combined, with actual arguments rather than just writing "Nah I disagree and you suck". Most of what you've said here is basically "Stop posting stuff I disagree with, no discourse allowed!"
The only point here with substance is the argument that we can't know it's Tera, but there isn't really any argument you can make that Tera is not the prime candidate for such a thing. The only other argument I've seen for an element is Power Creep, but other generations have had something like the Paradoxes and general bullshit powercreep; it's called Ultra Beasts.
Gen 7 was very popular and it had some of the stupidest power-creep ever. Ash Greninja, Magearna, Tapu Lele, etc. alongside the Ultra Beasts and big buffs to a lot of older Pokemon, on top of Megas and Z Moves existing. People generally like powerful metas with a ton of shit, to be quite honest and blunt. Gen 7 OU remained popular during SWSH.
Gen 9 by all means should be pretty popular considering that it has a ton of powerful threats that let you bypass most checks with an extra button, tons of setup moves and all that jazz, and there's really only one major element that was included. Like I guess sure, we do not have explicit data, if you wanted me to show that? I can't. But there isn't really anything else about Gen 9 OU that is outwardly adversive for the general audiences that ate up things like Gen 6 and 7.
What good does this discussion do? It's a warning for the next years for one, but also why stake any discussion's worth on if that discussion will singlehandedly change the outcome of a major community's decision. I have to keep reiterating that I don't think anything should or could be done because about five people responded to my post to the effect of "oh so then what about this tiering policy thing" and "well what do you want!!!"
In general, framing all discourse around the effect of "what is your solution" is not always a good thing. I don't have a solution and I won't claim to have one, at least one that people would actually like. Instead I am bringing up data to support my claim that Terastilization has harmed the health of the community in response to someone else, and you can agree or disagree, or we can talk about it as I am with the VGC part of the conversation.
