Splash Damage

Last year we promised that we'd start our second decade with the same degree of enthusiasm as our first. We did just that! We self-published with WarChest, we launched RAD Soldiers for mobile, we created Fireteam.net's online services suite, announced our entirely self-funded PC-shooter Dirty Bomb, and we expanded Splash Damage's talented development team.

2012's incredible success was entirely due to you, and the stats today prove it: whether you installed our games, tested them, played them, rated them, or talked about them, you did it at record levels! I'd like to give you a bit more detail, and a quick glimpse of what you can expect from us in the coming weeks and months.

WarChest

In 2012, our brand-new publishing label WarChest launched its first game, and thanks to you guys, went straight to #1! In fact, RAD Soldiers was the Christmas #1 strategy or board game in 86 countries, including the #1 Christmas hit in the US, Russia, China, Brazil, and the UK. As an independent developer we've always managed our own forums, but incredibly the Splash Damage and WarChest community has grown from 40,000 to more than 1 million players!

The girls and boys of WarChest now number around 20 staff, and I've started to think about our next smartphone and tablet title.

RAD Soldiers

We invested in a six-month open-Beta for RAD Soldiers, which we ran in Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, and Ireland. We loved the result from players - you've submitted hundreds of five star reviews on the App Store, and the forums are buzzing. Press liked it too, with Pocket Gamer giving it 9/10 and a Gold Award. The RAD Soldiers community has played the game for a staggering 90 million minutes! What's more, fans sent over 6.5 million turns in multiplayer!

We've already released three updates, and we're getting ready to invade a brand-new cultural capital with new maps, challenges, characters, weapons, and hundreds of tweaks and further balance improvements. We'll have more information for you in a few days!

Fireteam.net

We founded Fireteam to give us control over the online services and tools for our games, and the guys delivered - Fireteam served more than 2 million downloads in a month, and reached 15 million API calls per day, with no major outages to RAD Soldiers' worldwide service.

Fireteam also built 'Echo', Dirty Bomb's gameplay analysis tool. Echo has already recorded more than 40,000 matches, tracks a million combat interactions per day, with a phenomenal 100 million total events! Its visualisation helps us improve character and weapon balance, graphics frame-rate, network latency, and even memory usage. It's already stored more than 70 gigabytes of data, allowing us to deep-dive when investigating reports from the VIP players.

We're committed to making Dirty Bomb the smoothest, fastest, and best, PC shooter we've ever made, and Echo is already helping us to achieve that, and last week we released a video to showcase its features - you can watch that below if you missed it:

Dirty Bomb

With Dirty Bomb, we're creating our first PC-exclusive shooter in almost a decade, and just like our very first game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Dirty Bomb is made for PC and will be a free download at launch. In case you haven't caught them, we released a teaser trailer, gameplay trailer, and Echo gameplay analytics video. Dirty Bomb's videos have been watched more than a quarter of a million times already!

We've given fans access earlier than ever, and Founders in Dirty Bomb's Closed Alpha have already posted 7,500 feedback messages on the private VIP forums. If you want to help shape Dirty Bomb, you can get access through our Founder's Club now. Developers are usually in the nightly playtests at 8.00pm GMT. If you don't mind waiting for the release, you can sign up for free here.

We're working on the next video now, our vision for Dirty Bomb.

Before I forget...

We surpassed 100 team members for the first time, and we've recruited some incredible talent. Our newest team members have held senior positions on some of last years' top 10 titles. We were also elected to the UK's leading industry trade body, and as Splash Damage joined the Ukie Board alongside the world's 15 most successful publishers, we supported big-ticket items like Tax Relief and Crowd-funding, which alongside our keynote at Rock Paper Shotgun and Eurogamer's Rezzed event is all part of our plan to make the UK the best place in the world to create independent games.

We partnered with our favourite charity SpecialEffect to help make games more accessible for disabled gamers. We raised money and awareness, and we incorporated SpecialEffect's suggestions into our own games. We donated to Special Effect and the Make-a-Wish foundation, and we've selected two more organisations to support this year. We'll bring you more about that later.

Work also continues on our top secret console title, and we can't wait to tell you all about it.

We loved launching WarChest, especially because we can connect directly with our fans, and then creating our first mobile online title and running the beta for months ourselves. We love self-publishing RAD Soldiers and releasing updates as often as we like, founding Fireteam.net and building our gameplay analysis system Echo to give us control over the polish of our games. We loved announcing Dirty Bomb and running the Closed Alpha for our fans, to ensure it gets the widest possible testing and polish before release. We've loved expanding Splash Damage with even more talented artists, designers, and programmers too.

We're stunned by record levels of comments to our news posts, with several news items reaching several hundred posts. I can't wait to read your thoughts in response to this little blog too… we'll always listen to you, so let us know what you liked, and what you want to see next!

For all those stats and figures, what we're most proud of is you sticking with us through a tough period. We love you guys and girls for playing our games, so here's a really important final statistic.

I am your number one fan :)

Paul Wedgwood
@PaulWedgwood