Not a technical discussion of the merits of either system – ADRIFT would win hands down there, and while I might be biased in saying that, what with being an ADRIFT user, I also think it's true – but simply their popularity.
Over the last year, I count a grand total (going by the main website) of five games written with ADRIFT (not counting a couple that were previously written and look to have simply been added to the site), whereas over on the Quest site I see over a hundred. Yes, a hundred. Now I haven't played the great majority of those Quest games, and the few I have played haven't impressed me at all, but that's still one heck of a landslide victory for Quest in terms of sheer games output. Why has it suddenly become significantly more popular than ADRIFT?
This didn't use to be the case. If anything, when I hung around the Quest forum years back, it seemed pretty much dead in the water, with little discussion going on about games, writing, IF in general... or anything really. Half the threads were flame wars and the only people regularly posting were the trolls. New versions of Quest were released and, half the time, no one seemed to notice, or if they did notice they certainly kept quiet about it. A few games came out but not many people played them and the few that did seldom had anything very positive to say. Days would often go by without a single post on the forum.
Now look at Quest. Games being released at an unprecedented rate, the forum alive with discussion and they're even launching their own comp (the ingeniously titled QuestComp), which looks to be generating more interest amongst Quest users than any ADRIFT competition for years.
Quest seems to have taken ADRIFT's place as the 'go to' system for people wanting to write a text adventure without the hassle of learning a programming language. As ADRIFT's popularity wanes, Quest's grows. The overall quality of Quest games seems as low as ever, however, and the glowing reviews that populate the site need to be taken with a pinch of salt. By the look of things, it's possible for authors to register under different user names and vote up their own games. And there also seem to be a lot of people using Quest who are quite prepared to rate a game 5 out of 5 even if it's an unplayable mess and littered with so many typos it's hard to understand what it's about half the time. But, even allowing for all that, a great deal more people appear to be playing and writing Quest games than they do ADRIFT games.
Any ideas as to why Quest seems to have suddenly become popular and ADRIFT unpopular? And what, if anything, can be done about it?