Timothy Baldridge
patreon
The Fallout of Success
🕑 Added 2024-05-01 20:50:54 +0000 UTCIt's that time of the year, when I do a bit of campaigning for funds to keep Wabbajack moving forward. As it so happens we also saw a massive uptick in usage over the past few weeks. Thanks to a combination of the Fallout TV show, a IGN Article about Begin Again, and a sale on all Fallout games we saw over a 5x increase in traffic over the past half a month.
In general I like to refrain from asking for donations for Wabbajack as it gets annoying, but this project is user funded, and the costs of keeping the servers running and scaling properly to handle all those 4K LODs and clothing refits isn't free. So about once a year, around this time, I see the donations drop off and like to send out a reminder to throw a bit of love our way if you have the spare change. If not, we understand, but the donations do keep the project from becoming a financial burden to those who maintain the project.
Now, onto the fun stats, first of all, here's a screenshot of my internal metrics I use to keep track of usage of Wabbajack: 
Graphs without axis definitions are useless, but this one is fairly simple: each bar is one day of usage, showing the number of finished installs of users. Each color is a specific list. As you can see we went from around 2000-3000 on average to a peek of almost 12,000 at one time. The bigggest users are "Begin Again" , "Capital Punishment", "Magnum Opus" as well as a few other Fallout 4 list.
The massive uptick downlaods for "Begin Again" is due to a rather popular article by IGN recommending it (as well as Wabbajack) the video for which is currently sitting at around 500K views on Youtube. All this equated to a uptick in bandwidth and site usage that should level off at about 350TB this month, which is way more than we've ever seen in the history of the project.
As I mentioned I don't do these fundraising posts often, instead I normally do one a year, around May or June, and that pumps up donations to the point that they cover the costs of the site over the next twelve months as people slowly decide to divert their funds elsewhere. It just so happened that this year the biggest influx of users we've ever had happened right at the tailend of that 12 month cycle, so I figured I'd do a bit of fund raising and drum up a bit more support. As always, the best way to show support is here on Patreon.
Thank you all for your support of Wabbajack through the years. It's funny to think how excited I was the first time we hit 1000 installs in one day, then 2000 became normal, over the past year we've hit 3000 every weekend. And now we're seeing two days in a row with over 10,000 installs. It's great to see Wabbajack helping people get into modding, and here's to another 12 months of modding, and exploring the wasteland, or Tamriel, or wherever you may find yourself.
Comments
Matthew Hearne
You are the GOAT. Wabbajack is a revelation.
ImplodingSun
Agreed, thank you for Wabbajack. I have used it more than a few times for some great modlists. However, I really would like to use it on Linux given that Microsoft continues to implement more ads and AI "features" in Windows 11 and dropping support for Windows 10 in 6 months. I just tried the latest Wabbajack with Proton 9 and 8, which are famous for their wide compatibility, but no luck (even with .NET runtime installed). I don't know much about .NET, so I don't know what kind of work it would take for a Linux-compatible build. Regardless, I think there's a high chance it would be worth it considering that Microsoft will probably continue to make negative changes to Windows.
SpringHeelJon
Thanks for all you do Tim, been a crazy few weeks as that graph illustrates! You can see where the Fallout show is released and then when the IGN video drops. Our discord server for Begin Again got flooded and me and a lot of the support team had a late night! Its started to steady out now but I hope that the list and the video has represented Wabbajack well.
