2014 has been an interesting year for everyone heavily involved in video games. It’s been the year of Flappy Bird. The year of appauling game launches (which is starting to feel like every year, nowadays). The year the Xbone started releasing interesting titles. The year the PS4 releasing interesting titles. The year the Wii U really started releasing interesting titles. The year of GamerGate. Oh. Yes. Apparently that is carrying on, too.
So it is that this year has been interesting for 100xp too. Progress has been a little up and down. We set up this website, as you might be able to tell, which is a necessary step towards feeling a little more professional. We also pretty much quadrupled the content being put out on the 100xp channel and the quality level has remained consistent and possibly even quite high. Our first proper year has gone by and it feels like…
Honestly?
Like we’ve not gotten far.
Firstly, I should probably clarify that we is actually closer to an I at this stage. A crew is a requirement for the level of quality in the event coverage. I am forever thankful to Joe, our regular cameraman and the hidden half of the funny in the Eurogamer 2013 and 2014 videos. He’s got a proper job, though, in a proper city and everything! As a result it’s difficult to lean too heavily on him for support with anything else; until I find some more interested parties the coverage videos might remain simply to EGX and EGX Rezzed in 2015.
Secondly, what seemed like an amazing fluke at the end of 2013 when we saw over 2k views on our Eurogamer video and a subsequent 1.5k on the daft trailer to the Forest turned out to be exactly as it seemed; an amazing fluke. Getting videos out there this year has been an aggravating task despite the good quality level and my own personal feeling that the content has an audience, if only we could get to it. That isn’t to say that our videos have done poorly this year. It’s just that 200 views is still a small amount compared to what we’d like to continue to justify the work the videos take to put together.
I’ll try some new tactics this year, such as end cards and calls to action. These, personally, turn me away from videos but I’m hoping our subscriber base sees it as what it is, a requirement for the growth of our channel. If you’re reading this now, you’re clearly interested in the channel yourself. I can’t overstate how helpful sharing it with your friends and people you think would be interested would be for us. Oh, and thanks for watching!
I organised three tournaments this year, too, between friends; Two were for Mario Kart and one was for Smash Brothers. The footage from both of these was interesting but incredibly difficult to piece together in a coherant way. Indeed, I am still working out how I could present the second tournament footage now. You might see it at some point in the new year.
Looking forward, we’re by no means letting go of our goal in growing the channel. We’re going to keep going to the stuff we’ve done before. We might even, and this is if we’re lucky and have an interest in it ourselves, be covering some other events this year. I’ve had my eye on Gamescon for a while now, but it’d be a lot of effort. Who knows?
We hope you have a good New Year and we’ll see you there.