Recently I got interested in Shoot'em ups (shmups) and fortunately I found a thriving community of shmup players and developers. They are active online and despite their niche being very small it seems they are trying to popularize the genre.

I think shmup players are getting out of the elitism some small niches tend to move torwards and want to reach to new comers and steer development of new titles in ways to benefit not only the hardcore players.

Is this happening in other game genres too?