Board Game Online 2011 Overview
2011 Overview
A lot has happened this year. Did you know that one year ago, Board Game Online had so few players that I'd given up on the concept? And look at us now. Time for a little story. <3
Early 2011
Personally, I'd given up hope BGO would ever be big. There's so many other game concepts that can easily be profitable. There's a lot of games that sell power to players and that's such an easy way to make money. Being poor as I was, I figured that'd be my future.
Meanwhile, Ano still believed in the concept. He'd watched me develop it and asked me to be allowed to continue the project. I let him. From time to time I would help him out or explain how things worked and he kept at it. Seeing him having fun made me nostalgic. I missed good old BGO. But why should I work on a dead end project? That is, until...
EpicMafia
Some idiots from a site called EpicMafia bring down the server! We went away for a short weekend and when we got back the server was down, completely unusable. It took me many hours to get it working again. The lobby was full of people in a matter of minutes and the site went down again. I had no idea what was going on until those players started posting on our Facebook page. We'd been invaded.
We keep track of active players. Those are the people who actually create/join games. Each month we'd count the unique ones and hope it'd be more than the previous month. In January, we had about 80 active players. We grew quickly after that and reached 823 active players in April. Luckily, we stored our statistics from that moment on. A good thing, because we wouldn't have wanted to forget what happened. Let's put that into a nice little graph!
The incredible rise of active players in December was mainly thanks to a topic on the SomethingAwful forums.2012
Let's just say BGO has my full attention once more. In fact, more than ever before. Ano and me have both taken part-time jobs and can now spend 2 days a week on the game. Our plans have gotten wilder... more awesome than ever before. What can you expect to see in 2012? Sneak peek time!
Board Game Online 2.0 (Now with 50% more AIDS!)A brand new interface that is flexibly resizable, has tons of options and looks WAY better. In addition, we intend to make BGO more playable on mobile devices.
More Seasonal Content!
We like how seasonal stuff can spice the game up. We intend to keep adding more and more, so that eventually BGO will feel unique all the time!
New Game Modes!
We've got a list of new game modes to spice things up a little. For example, there will be a Sprint Mode where you don't set a finish space, but an amount of rounds the game will last. The player who's furthest wins.
More Control!
You'll be able to put a max on the number of players that can join your game. Hosts will be able to kick and ban players from their game before it starts. You'll even be able to set the duration of the turn timer! And more...
More Suggestions Pages!
We intend to implement suggestions pages similar to the Jukebox Suggestions Page for the Orly and Trivia questions. We are very interested in adding more ways for the community to add to the game!
Brand New Mechanics!
We've got an incredible amount of exciting, new game mechanics coming up! From ghosts trying to eat your cursor to bombs trying to blow up your screen!
Donator Love!
Since we live off the kindness of our players, we'll be adding more donator rewards! You can expect personalizable events, special game options and a buttload of ways to humiliate your friends and show them that your e-peen is definitely bigger than theirs. Because it is. And they should know.
Enough of this gibberish. We love you guys. We'll be setting up a new, better server early 2012 and I promise we'll work our asses off to make sure 2012 becomes the year where BGO conquers the world. You've made us believe that we can. So let's do this thing! ROARRRRRR!!!!
With Love,DysprosiumDy & Ano