I wrote a response to this post as a blog entry.
http://forums.graalonline.com/forums/blog.php?b=240
However, I will also post it below since it is appropriate:
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Is Graal actually dying? The simple answer is:
no.
But it's a little more complicated than that.
Every day we all seem to lose a little more hope for our childhood memories that we made on this small 2D Zelda-esque multiplayer RPG. I won't deny this at all.
What seemed to once be a flourishing little community has now turned into a fallow field, sparsely scattered with dying plants and a few dried up seeds. The dying plants are the players who have grown up on this game because they were once nourished with dreams, potential, and entertainment... and the withered seeds are the developers and artists in the community who have the potential to make a large impact on Graal but don't have the motivation to do so anymore because they have been begging for updates for so long that they've grown bitter and exhausted with hopelessness and frustration.
Many people are so caught up in their vexation of Graal's current state that they neglect to look at the other side of the situation.
The truth of the matter is that
Graal seems to be more popular now than it has ever been in the past.
The word iPhone seems to be a dreaded word today in our community on Graal, most likely due to jealousy of the care and nurturing it is receiving by Graal's cultivators - and the delinquency that the PC version is undoubtedly experiencing.
However, the iPhone versions of Graal are receiving thousands of visitors on a daily basis - much higher than the traffic that the PC version is pulling. So...
the truth is that Graal is not dying, but evolving. The strategy used to popularize Graal is completely different than what we have been used to experiencing for the past 10 years.
The iPhone is generating much larger amounts of revenue and... for what? Almost no extra cost or work at the hands of the game developers.
Graal is not dead, nor is it dying. It is changing, quite drastically. It is "moving" to a new home - so to speak.
Will Graal be able to sustain an iPhone community forever? Probably not. However, now we have tested mobile devices to see how players handle the game, and it has been, in my opinion, a much larger success than anyone had anticipated.
I am confident that if Graal is not on the iPhone forever, then it will always be on a mobile device from now on - and what's wrong with that? Not a thing.
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Sadly, this means that we will probably not receive the amount of updates that we once received for the PC version of Graal, but nothing is forever and things will always change.