I think you might not be wrong.
The Game Room is nice. A seperate Sports forum would not be. Too many subfora = bad.
I completely disagree with the premise of the OP. Having almost no interest whatsoever in playing mb games, I feel the pain of having to skim past so many game threads. However, I don’t begrudge that at all. As one of the agitators for a sports forum, I consider the Game Room a rousing success.
And while I have more than my fair share of complaints around here, I won’t hesitate to praise the administration for the new Game Room forum. It isn’t exactly what I recommended; it’s better. Way better.
Though I would agree that cooking threads feel out of place in the Cafe. In my original request for a sports forum, I recommended that cooking threads should all go into MPSIMS. What is more mundane than cooking?
Back to the topic of sports, bear in mind that the Game Room was created in the dead part of the sports calendar, as alluded to by Jim. (I’m not surprised by the lack of participation in the NHL and NBA threads; compared to MLB and the NFL, they’re practically fringe sports.)
Note that over the years us sports fans have grown accustomed to having to maintain singular, monolithic threads in order to not get lost in the fray. That’s why you’ll see 10 page NFL threads with the ultra-general “offseason” and “draft” topics. As we get used to having an entire forum to play in, I’m sure we’ll eventually start to see a nice splintering of the topics.
Mostly it’s just the season. The only real problem is that some of the more prolific sports posters, including me and I suspect also RickJay, won’t be resubscribing, but instead waiting for free posting. So after a couple weeks, there will be even fewer sports topics in the Game Room. But again, it’ll be in the dead season and some of us won’t be able to post anyway. Just give it time.
ETA: Consider that once the NFL season starts, there will be at least three fantasy football threads, a Steelers thread, an NFC East thread, probably a few pools and pickem threads, and no doubt several topical player-related threads, most of which may stay on the front page for an extended period of time.