2024 Retrospective

Tending the Garden

Cory "corjam" Sutyak • Feb. 9, 2025

I must admit, part of the reason I've taken so long to write up this year's retro was that I wasn't sure what to talk about. In many respects, with the rejuvenation of the new generation's fighting game launches dying down a little bit, it felt like this year was a bit more sedated compared to last year.

Then I thought about it. And then I looked at numbers compared to where we ended in 2023. I was wrong with my thinking.

  • 7.1k unique users on the site last year (up from 5.8k)
  • 93k matches in the stats system (up from 40k)
  • 1.2k tournaments in the stats system (up from 762)

I haven't done the stats to see which of these new numbers are specifically from last year as it is common to import older tournaments sometimes. But it's safe to assume the majority of them are. We, as a community, played an insane amount of fighting games this year, the vast majority of which were offline. Additionally, these are only the numbers I can compare to last year easily. Some other stats we have:

There's a lot of talk on fgc social media that locals are dying and struggling. This conversation isn't anything new, but it's been more present as of late. The data that we have leads me to contest those claims.

Specific locals do come and go. It's rare for an individual community to thrive the same way it always has. A lot of that, in my opinion, stems from the burnout that goes into being a Tournament Organizer. The amount of time and effort it takes to keep a local healthy is nothing short of exhaustive. Due to the chronic exhaustion, it's hard for Tournament Organizers to experiment with new ideas, which causes locals to feel stale.

Through the work that's been done with the Ohio FGC, a framework has been largely put in place that provides resources, visibility, and networking that, I believe, helps lessen the load on any individual Tournament Organizer. Also, the health of the scene as a whole becomes less dependent on any single Tournament Organizer, which allows for a more decentralized and resilient community.

Due to this resiliency, every year we get to build a little bit higher and further than we have previously. The positive feedback loop that results generates huge momentum.

That momentum has led us to do the following in 2024:

  • Started an online shop that'll help pave the way for better community-driven sustainability of the website and future projects
  • Using our stats system, we built out the capability to auto generate upcoming events and tournament winners, helping expand our reach and grow our social media, all while providing recognition for our players and tournament organizers for their events.
  • Added an achievements system to the website, providing recognition and a new type of leaderboard for people to aim for that isn't strictly being the player who wins the tournament.
  • Helped numerous other states kickstart their own website through our Open-Sourced template .
  • Directly related, our sister project usafgc.com , has grown to accommodate the new resources from the states who have launched their own websites, as well has showcasing other community driven projects. This project is also Open-Sourced.
  • Reorganized a lot of the Ohio FGC Social Media to better funnel people directly to their local scenes' community channels, helping prospective community members find their people, faster.

Reading all of this back makes me realize how horrendously wrong I was thinking we didn't accomplish a lot this year. What really happened was that seeds we planted in 2023 and 2024 are starting to take tangible form.

What does this mean for 2025?

Everyone will say their local scene is the best. It should be no shock that I also think the locals I go to are the best. But despite when I try to strip that bias from my thinking, I truly believe that the innovation the Ohio scene is doing is setting the gold standard that every other scene is trying to live up to.

These seeds are going to keep growing. I think the natural progression of everything we've built so far leans towards making more content. We've dipped our toes already with some articles on the site. We set up the YouTube channel last year. As of today, the Twitch Channel has hit the requirements for affiliate. I can't predict with 100% certainty what's going to happen, but with proper watering and sunlight, I see a world where those outlets grow, feeding back into the community, allowing us to do cool stuff and create more positive feedback loops.

To kick that off, today we're releasing a project we've been working on:

OHIO FGC TV

We have an insane amount of historical video content, ten years worth. Most of it doesn't get much visibility. That should change.

A lot of the details are probably going to evolve over time, but the idea is that on select days of the week, the Ohio FGC Twitch channel is going to be streaming that history. Taking sets and events from slices of the community in a chronological order, we will have something akin to a history channel where people can tune in periodically and catch a glimpse of what has come before, what we're building off of.

This will be an effort to recognize the hard work of the Tournament Organizers and players that have come before and provide a crucial lens for the next generation to know their history.

At the start we'll be sourcing content from MatchStick Melee, Outer Haven, and IDG. We'll be adding to it overtime and we're going to try to include as many slices as we can, it just takes a good deal of effort to sift through everything.

Watch Live Here

Tl;dr: We were crushing it, we're still crushing it, and we're going to keep crushing it.

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