welcome back to everyone's favorite number-show, 2018 edition. don't know where you're finding yourself? no worries, you can read up on all of it. par example you may wanna first read about the 2017 numbers before diving into the recap of this season with the soothing title:

"the calm before the storm"

webwise

as a loyal reader of this segment you rightfully ask: where is my table showing the access to vvvv.org per country? i'm afraid, in the wake of the great GDPR we couldn't be bothered to figure out how legal it was to still track you around with google-analytics, so we simply dropped it. means no such data for 2018. we're planning to install a more privacy friendly tool sometime this year. so there should be some such data again next year.

did you fall asleep yet? how about instead we offer you a peek at your favorite forum-search terms of this past year:

note: terms are listed in order of frequency, where "kinect" is curiously about 3 times ahead of the follow-up "dx11". the rest is rather evenly distributed. i'm only a bit concerned about that "integer value"...

overall it seems 2018 was a rather stagnant year for vvvv.org as we can also see from the graph above depicting the number of new daily topics on the forum. nothing we'll be able to impress our investors with... but can you blame yourself? the same old website for over 10 years now. wish i could tell you about what's brewing, but i'm afraid, we've signed an NDA with ourselves...

downloads

* x86 and x64 combined

don't be fooled by the spike: certainly the high download-counts can mostly be attributed to the fact that we also had the highest number of relases this year. but then if you take the ratio addons/core you'll see that the number of serious users (those with addons) keeps slightly decreasing...

licenses

boom. and still. despite the rather modest numbers shown above, arguably one of the more important numbers went up again. 2018 brought us the 3rd best result in terms of licenses and dongles sold. so let's see who contributed to this:

ahm..not so good. the number of individual commercial users is still going down, even though those who're using vvvv are apparently getting more productive with it. team marketing, your turn!

looking more closely we can totally infer global economic trends from the listing of "licenses sold per country": for the first time in recorded history the UK is brexiting from spot 2, overtaken by russia who made a surprise jump with its by far highest percentage to date. also big up austria for their best share so far. and both first time showing in the ranks: china and italy. anything to learn from that?

so here we are. after 16 years in development vvvv still hasn't made it out of beta and it may seem this fact takes a toll in the numbers. we were really hoping we could finally release our next big thing (that is vvvv gamma) by the end of 2018, but then we luckily got sidetracked by Xenko. while we're quite optimistic that gamma will conquer new worlds where no 3d-animation has ever been seen before, Xenko certainly completes our vision and certainly only will make vvvv gamma useful for many of you.

we've done our homework by realizing the first vvvv gamma/xenko-only project Ocean Of Air together with MLF. we learned a lot and it showed us where workflows are still not optimal. we're now in the process of polishing those and fixing the most annoying buggers before we'll be releasing it into your precious hands.

but don't lean back and wait! according to a recent study, 55% of you are not using VL at all yet. who do you think we're doing this for? and 40% of those are whining "because i just didn't find the time to get into it yet". well fellows, it is about time to find that time! because it may take you a while. it may be hard in the beginning. so let us take you by the hand and lead you through the struggles of learning, we'll show you something to make you change your mind. we're there for you here and here with our unprecedented 24/7-free-unlimited (fair use) helplines to guide you along all of your steps. it is only on you to take that offer, because as i wisely just came up with: "s/he who asks a question is already one step closer to the answer".

btw. that study i just mentioned is still running. if you haven't already, please fill it out now.

so up next: 2019, allegedly the most exciting year in vvvv history (so far). the road ahead is packed with goodies and we can't wait to start working on them and share them with you. to those of you who happily bought their licenses: it is right and just. stay who you are and you'll be forever in our quads! to those who didn't: not so smart. grow up!.

and everybody: happy new!
yours,
vvvv.