I agree with this. It looks to me like about 20-30% never make it past the announcement stage. Then half the ones that actually do launch never get much traction, don’t get listed, and are life-support. I would not be surprised if 80-90% of these are dead, or effectively dead, in a year.
My guess for the survivors will be BCH, BTG, LBTC, BTA, EtherZero, Litecoin Cash, and Bitcoin Private, just because they are getting some hype at this stage. The vast majority of the rest don’t seem to have much interest.
The fork phenomenon is a great test tube for crypto experimentation, it's a great way to distribute coins, and given all the heartache projects like NXT and NEM went through to distribute their tokens, and all the criticism ripple gets over XRP, I think airdrops, forks and now merge forks are smart way to distribute without needing PoW or ICO
I think BTCH has done something really quite cool, they got the idea of merge forks initially from bitcoin private, but added significantly to the idea by just combining the utxo sets from the 3 merged coins (btc DEX Hush), so they start with a chain of only 250mb, not massive like bitcoin private which must be close to 200 gb, plus BTCH has bitcoin level security through delayed PoW used by Komodo asset chains. It's pretty cool stuff, even if they just did it to show off the Komodo tech, and if a few bitcoin whales start claiming, who knows, it gives them access to a Z-cash clone with easy p2p trading on BarterDEX.
The other one I like best is BTA which has atomic swaps built in from the get go.
I haven't reaĺy checked out EtherZero, thanks for the tip!