Do people still play modded Minecraft?

I’ve been out of the community for about a year now. I’m just wondering if modded minecraft is still popular and what modpacks people play.

I’m not sure how anyone else but I think mods are what’s keeping minecraft alive. I can’t even remember the last time I even played minecraft with absolutely no mods. Even when on occasion I do play vanilla servers I always have a few client mods installed. I’m a really big fan of FTB, there’s so many mods in there that I don’t really get a chance to explore them all so no matter how much time I end up spending on even a single pack there’s almost always something new and interesting for me to explore.
I also have a feeling that quite a few of the features implemented in minecraft was inspired by mods. Some examples would be the Ender Chest from Enderstorage and the new recipe book in 1.12 which likely seems inspired by all those recipe mods for example JEI, NEI, etc.

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It definitely decreased a lot early this year and at the end of last year. 1.7.10 and even 1.6.4 and 1.4.7 was way more popular (in terms of unique players enjoying the packs) than what 1.8, 1.9 and even 1.10, 1.11 are.

Google trends reports it like this (for ftb, since it delivered famous quality packs through the entire time):
Last 5 years:

Last 2 years:

Further, Minecraft used to be in the TOP 8 of Twitch every day. Now its barely even getting into the TOP 20. (most of those big streamers played modded)

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It’s pretty stale at the moment. Every pack has the same or similar mods, mod authors are constantly having to update their mods due to increased speed MC releases updates, and there’s no new interesting mods. They’re just the same mods from before, just remade a bit different. FTB just recently added all the CoFH team mods to their 1.10 packs as they’re now updated to 1.10, they’re still pretty similar to the 1.7.10 versions, and not new enough for anyone to get excited about them. There are a few new mods that could be interesting, but are never featured in any packs. The other thing I think lead to the this state of modded minecraft is CurseForge. CurseForge/“Twitch Client” is the true curse of the modded server community. If you want an FTB pack, you have to get it on curse or try to find it on the legacy launcher. The “Twitch” client also does not support linux, so there goes another whole group of users who cannot use the client. Curse/Twitch also has many problems with the client itself, not just the Minecraft part of it. It’s constantly trying to be something it’s not, a chat client, a video chat client, a voice client, a public chat client(like public discords), and a game launcher. It fails at all those things. The Minecraft part of the launcher is pretty bad, it fails to install everything sometimes, resulting in packs being unable to launch. It says it focuses on performance, but
And that’s just opening it and leaving it on the home screen. Twitch/Curse has also lead to pack quality degrading, as modpack authors can just scroll through a menu and pick a bunch of mods to throw into a pack. I also think many of the popular Minecraft youtubers don’t promote packs as much as they have before and have moved on to “Lucky Block Challenges” or something of the sort. Youtuber packs still gain the most players, as players want to play the same pack as their favorite youtubers do. I currently run a TrollCraft server(Modpack by Kehaan and played by a bunch of youtubers), and it gets around 30+ players at peak times.

tl;dr Few new mods that aren’t in any packs, Twitch is a Curse, modpack authors are getting lazy, players want youtuber packs.

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One thing I forgot to mention. We are running one of the biggest modded minecraft networks, when we added the first 1.10 servers, about half our player base couldn’t properly play those due to increased hardware requirements. Nearly everyone complains about the increased loading time, too. It already increased about a 1/3 from 1.6 to 1.7 but the increase from 1.7 to 1.10 was about double.
In 2017 no one wants to wait +5 minutes for a game to load, especially not if it crashes from time to time. Not to speak of the ingame performance of most 1.10 modpacks.

Just to throw in on the opposite site, we as a whitelisted server have seen a slight increase in playerbase compared to 1.7.10.
Possibly due to a lot of smaller networks that still hadn’t made the jump, while we ran 1.8.9 packs pretty much since they came out (around March 2016). Another reason could be, serverlistings where flooded with 1.7.10 servers which made it hard for us to stand out, now it feels like there’s a lot less servers to choose from.

Sadly I have no playtime data to back that up, but here’s our forum traffic from Janurary 2016 until today. Since you need to apply on our website this should somewhat accurately reflect the interest.