As we rapidly approach the end of 2014 we like to do a bit of year in review of how our community has grown and what accomplishments we’ve all achieved. Note: the official announcement has tons of links to all of the resources we mention. You can read it at http://news.thegamecrafter.com/post/105277876577/2014-a-crafters-retrospective Otherwise, happy reading!
Our friends at Gamer’s Remorse became an official TGC reviewer, then we introduced discounted shipping to them, then they became part of The Dice Tower network, and then they introduced spending crafter points to trick out your reviews.
We gave the site a bit of a freshening up. And added cool new features such as the new related games subsystem, payouts system, and designer associates. We also launched our ideas page, which now has over 1000 ideas in it. And upgraded the chat system twice. We also started offering sanity tests, wish lists, and community auctions.
We ran our first two community Kickstarters: Village in a Box and The Captain is Dead. Both were run and fulfilled in the same year. And both were huge successes thanks to our amazing community. In addition, 11 new designers made sales and got acclaim they probably wouldn’t have otherwise gotten. And many of you ran your own hugely successful crowd funding campaigns. So many, in fact, that we had to start keeping a list of community crowd funding campaigns.
We also made placing bulk orders quite a bit easier, cheaper, and better.
Many of you have started offering advice and reviews in the form of videos, podcasts, blogs and sites. In addition, you’ve all touted a tremendous amount of tweets this year. We also started offering advice on how to run a Kickstarter.
We made several updates to our API. And many of you started using it for various things.
And as always, we’ve added a huge number of components and component updates this year. Printed components include double-sided tiles, large square circle and hex chits, small square cards, sticker pawns, 96 and 48 card square tuck boxes, 54 and 108 card bridge tuck boxes, 90 card jumbo tuck box, domino and triangle tiles, small square and circle chits, and dials. And some of the new parts are chevrons, drops, herbs, hearts, medium pro box insert, and several different sprues.
Besides Gen Con, the community at large has attended a massive amount of conventions and shows this year. And The Game Crafter even ran it’s first Protospiel in Madison.
We also ran four amazing contests, and helped out Card’s Against Humanity with their Tabletop Deathmatch contest. Many of the winners and runners up of these contests have gone on to get publishing deals or have massively successful kick starters. JT even received a death threat about one contest.
We also hit a few milestones this year. For example, our community has now created over 50,000 games in our system. We now have more than 60,000 users. And we manufactured more than 80,000 games this year.
Phew! That’s a lot of stuff. And as much as all that is, 2015 will make it look trivial. Stay tuned!
Official announcement with links available at http://news.thegamecrafter.com/post/105277876577/2014-a-crafters-retrosp...
