Should there be a paid forum script mainly/purely for hobbyists?

And before anyone suggests free stuff, keep in mind some people like professional support and the guarantee the software will be maintained, my experience is that relying on volunteers for anything important means it'll never get done.

But back to the point, should there be such a forum script? vBulletin is clearly being targetted at businesses and enterprise customers (despite its complete lack of suitability for such a purpose), IPB is to a degree being targetted at the same market and so are many other paid scripts.

But the problem is, businesses and hobbyists need very different features and things. Your average gaming site or fansite doesn't need any large scale server related features or shopping related add ons or business cards or project management tools, it needs stuff like arcades and shoutboxes and mood systems and things to appeal to a mostly younger market of kids and teenagers. And the style design needs to be different too, your average Pokemon or Halo or Call of Duty or Final Fantasy forum doesn't need a clean/minimalist style or CSS sprites or whatever else, it needs a more traditional one that can be easily modified and appeals to the demographic said sites are aimed at.

So could this be a potential gap in the market for a new forum script? It's not something I would/could make myself, but I think there's definitely a possibility to get rich with a forum script aimed at the fan and hobbyist rather than businessman. Many of these sites do already use paid scripts and hosting after all (about 99% use paid hosting and I'd say at least 50% use either IPB, vBulletin or XenForo), and it does seem like a lot of forum software just isn't suitable for such sites any more with their attempts to mimic Facebook or Twitter.

What do you think?

 

I think vBulletin still fits the bill for most hobbyist type sites. It's a little pricey now but hands down has the most active mod community.

 

Economic standpoint, this isn't smart.

 

True. But does everything have to be purely from an economic standpoint? There's still a lot of money to be made aiming at the mass market rather than rich people and companies and tailoring your services to suit.

And I think the over focus on large companies is what's probably destroying a lot of software and the companies that make it.

 

I think it's a good idea. While the existing scripts may cater to hobbyists, I bet that they are looking for features that are not found in the most popular forum scripts. It would also be a good idea to make it open source so that people can contribute and add value to the script.