2014 has been an incredible year for TechRaptor. We went to our first conventions as members of the press, conducted some awesome interviews, and grew in both reader base and pageviews. In the beginning of 2014 we had only a few hundred Twitter followers, now we have over 8,000! We're on the rise, and because of how much fun we had this year, we want to look back at what made this year great!
Our pack is constantly growing
Raptors hunt in Packs, right? Well our "Pack" of staff grew bigtime this year. We have over 75 new and existing authors writing for us this year, many of whom came after #GamerGate and a decent number of which left the team for various reasons. As long as people keep applying to write for us, we'll keep growing to bring you content daily!We've made changes to our editorial process multiple times throughout the year in an effort to increase efficiency and article quality - and we plan to continue making changes as we strive for the best quality in every article!
Expansion into other mediums
We've exploded in the "print" area of our site, with tons of people reading out content every day! Naturally, it's time to evolve a bit and get started in Video and Audio! Micah is doing some regular Op-Eds that are both print and video, and we have a few new writers looking to regularly push new gaming videos!Our Podcast, The Weekly Respawn, began in late October and has been a weekly staple ever since. We talk about many topics - basically anything tech or gaming related. Watch out for it every Wednesday!
Conventions
We had the absolute pleasure to be invited as members of the press to a few conventions and conferences this year. We went to C2E2 (Chicago) in early 2014, then followed up with Indy PopCon (Indianapolis), TechWeek (Chicago), and finally GenCon (Indianapolis). With each event, we're learning more and more about what people like to see, and we can't wait to return in 2014 to do even more and get some fantastic interviews up!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGGC7pRsBvk
In 2015, our goal is to go back to these conventions and do an even better job at covering them. On top of that, our newest goal is to GET TO E3! We've had a lot of requests for E3 Coverage, and we're going to do our absolute best to get there! Should we get invited to be there as members of the press - it will be a mad dash to cobble funds together to get there, but we'll find a way!
Site Growth
We've grown bigtime in 2014 - check out some of our graphs from Google Analytics!2013
2014
That's really, really incredible growth! On top of that, we gained over 7,500 Twitter followers and 1,000 Facebook Likes!
We plan to continue growing, and hope that we can top this by at least double next year!
A few articles you may have missed
In 2014, we published 1,500 posts! In 2013, we only published 302! Inevitably, you may have missed some of our posts - so here's a few to check out!Pre-#GamerGate
- Delving into the world of DOTA
- Interview with CD Projekt Red {EXCLUSIVE}
- The Origins of 7 Popular Game Names
- Plot Does Matter: A Response to “Death to the Three-Act Structure”
- Why I Can’t Quit Spelunky: A Retrospective
- Honesty Hour: Has A Game Ever Made You Cry?
- Sexy or Respectable? Why Not Both?
Post-#GamerGate
- The International 2014 and why the future of eSports looks good
- Technical Director John O’Neill talks Firefly Online
- Interview with Eugene Ivanov
- An Interview With Thomas Spargo, Founder of Gamer’s Rhapsody
- IMO: Agenda Based Reviews – Mind of Micah C
#TechRaptorHeadlines
On November 27th, we posted an article about Seedscape, a game by Jennifer Dawe - and how a Twitter user, Untimely Gamer, tried to get it boycotted. What followed was a tweet by them that spurred a hashtag our AWESOME followers grabbed onto and continued. Hilarity ensued!Here's the starting tweet followed up with a few of our favorites!
Untimely Gamer Eats a Bag of Crisps. #TechRaptorHeadlines — Yuletidely Gamer (@untimelygamer) November 27, 2014
@georgieonthego @TechRaptr 15 Reasons Why You Should Not Consider Eating Humans #TechRaptorHeadlines pic.twitter.com/YW3M1ModhW — Micro! (@Micromonics) November 27, 2014
@georgieonthego#TechRaptorHeadlines "Where are they now ? Exclusive interviews with the most underrated dinosaurs in gaming" — Nervatel (@Nervatel) November 27, 2014
Thanks for the laughs and, as always, the support! Seeing those pop up from time to time is something our team always enjoys! #GamerGate
Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, this is gonna be a long one! We've had some highs and lows through #GamerGate, so here's the rundown!How about we start at the beginning...
A long time ago, in a theme park far, far, away...errr wrong story! Ahem! In late August, an alleged scandal with a female developer and journalist erupted. While many of us at first didn't know about what was going on, one of our writers, Andrew Otton, took the time to sit down and write a few posts about her and the situation at hand. It's worth noting, that in none of these did he or TechRaptor seek to attack or demean her.
Andrew started off with Zoe Quinn and the Unfortunate State of the Gaming Industry, an article in which he sought to break down the issues at hand with both Zoe Quinn and the gaming industry/journalism itself. The next article, Zoe Quinn: Censorship, Hypocrisy, and Double Standard, was aimed at how deliberately one-sided the media approached the issue now known as #GamerGate. The final piece, titled Zoe Quinn and Lying Journalists was written as a reflection and summary of the previous two.
On August 29th at 8 AM, we posted an article titled We are not witnessing the 'End of Gamers', which was a response to the staggering number of articles that labeled gamers as "Deceased". While we all knew this was untrue, as we have many lives, it was worth a clarification. By 2 PM EST, our site was under attack and we were down for 16 hours.
Note: We have since discovered that we had been DDoS'ed with so much force that the COLO our host was located in had to null route our Virtual Private Server's IP Address. This was a fair decision of them to make - the 16 hours it took was not, so we made the switch and couldn't be happier!
September, October, November, and December have been no different either! We received an outpour of support from the gaming community, suffered some other attacks to our website, and grew in knowledge and skill. We've been pushed to be our best and work our hardest to put out the best quality content we can. While we may make mistakes here and there, we'll always admit to them, fix them, and learn from them.
The events of #GamerGate made us double down on our transparency (something we've been all about since we started in 2013), and we published our code of ethics among a few other things! We also launched a new series, called The State of TechRaptor (October Ed, November Ed), in response to reader questions about our plans and growth! In addition to that, we'll be doing our first Q&A stream in January of 2015. Tweet any questions you have to us with the hashtag #AskTechRaptor and we'll do our best to address all of them as well as any that are asked live during the stream!
Since #GamerGate began, many staff members have had much to say about the topic. Some of the highlights include Todd Wohling's Good Morning Orthodxy! series, our interview with Daniel Vavra, our interview with Brad Wardell, and the many opinion pieces written by Georgina Young. Plenty more staff members have written about it as well, feel free to search around. We also did a #GamerGate Podcast!
#GamerGate proved and validated concerns that we had when TechRaptor was started - that gamers wanted better games journalism. That they want games journalism that won't be bought or bribed into better review scores, that won't back down from the truth, lie to its readers, and will be transparent and honest. We're happy to work every day to fill that void, and we hope that gamers will continue to visit us every day to help us grow into a fully-upgraded TechRaptor.
What a year!
2014 was an incredible year for TechRaptor. When we started in March of 2013, we had no idea that we would have grown this much by the end of 2014 - hell, I had us predicted at finishing the year around 150,000 pageviews each month. Instead, we hit 300,000 and grew our team immensely. We can't wait to continue our growth this year, and share it with you every step of the way.Happy New Year to our Pack - you are all amazing,
Rutledge Daugette, Founder