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ddavison

2014 Year in Review for SmiteWorks

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This year has been a very busy year and we wanted to reach out to everyone who helped make it a special year for us. I'll be sending out another email later this week (or next) with some news on plans for 2015.

For me personally, I decided that once Fantasy Grounds made it through the Greenlight process on Steam, it was time to hang up the corporate life and focus 100% on growing Fantasy Grounds. The results have been fairly good, but I always hope for more. I made the change in late April and began a much more active campaign of engagement with the community through Facebook, G+ and elsewhere. I've researched and learned way more than I ever wanted to know about this area and I was met with moderate success. We also did some experiments with new advertisement outlets and made some changes to prices, package offerings and a new option for subscriptions. I've also made some great connections with several new folks in the RPG industry that should help us going forward.

For the core engine, John rolled out the final touches of version 3.0 at the very end of last year. With nearly 10 releases this year, he has managed some major strides forward in rebuilding the core ruleset used for many of the rulesets. New changes were rolled out to the included rulesets (CoreRPG, 3.5E, 4E, PFRPG, Numenera and our new 5E ruleset.) The biggest news of that bunch is that we added a very nice 5E ruleset for fans of the latest version of D&D. This also led to updates to many of our other rulesets, such as D20 Modern and Call of Cthulhu.

Our Community developers have been extremely helpful pushing out new rulesets such as FATE Core, Savage Worlds updates and extensions (ETU, for example) and a bunch of great, free rulesets and extensions that are posted to the forums or to the Wiki. A massive, new update to Savage Worlds is nearly ready to release and should go live after the holidays. On top of that, I added in some new built in maps and tokens for all licenses. Many thanks go out to these developers. I especially want to highlight the contributions of phantomwhale, Sorceror, Ikael, Doswelk, Mask_of_Winter, Trenloe, PoisonAlchemist, MGrancey, Valarian, S Ferguson, cscase and Zeus.

Zeph Ponos (aka Zeus) joined our team officially. Zeph has been helping us with some graphics, features and data packs for 5E (in hopes that we can secure a license with WoTC in 2015 or use an OGL license) and some super exciting work on the Unity port of Fantasy Grounds.

Damned and Trenloe have led the way to putting out two FG Cons last year and damned has helped me with several other items on the side.

Last but not least, we launched FG on Steam and greatly expanded our audience and reach. Shortly after the launch, we also packaged a neatly wrapped version of FG for Mac users that installs with a single click and runs like a native app.

With all of those things, here are some interesting stats for the year compared with 2013:

Our annual revenue grew to 226% year-over-year (YOY)
G+ followers grew to 419% YOY
Facebook Likes grew to 143% YOY
Forum membership grew by 125% YOY
New Licenses grew 253% YOY


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Links:
Fantasy Grounds: http://www.fantasygrounds.com
Fantasy Grounds Forums: http://www.fantasygrounds.com/community/
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/fantasygrounds
Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/+Fantasygrounds/posts

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