Hello everyone, Happy New Year!

It's about this time that most people are looking back to the previous year and looking forward to the next, but I'm taking this in a different direction. We're looking back at the last seven years and on to the following seven.

January 17th, 2017, was the first day that Dank Memer's bot account existed. It was a hobby, nothing more, by a fledging developer who had just dropped out of college. We started as a meme bot; currency and games weren't even a thought on our minds.

Throughout the next nearly seven years, we grew this community to insane highs and helped each other through depressing lows. We got through periods where we lost money each month paying server costs, and we learned the hard way to handle multiple days of downtime. We've wiped our entire database in times of great dupes and manually given hundreds of rewards by hand to compensate people for issues. We've seen both ends of quarantine and the worst COVID peaks together, and every hard decision caused by our inexperience or outside forces like the very chat platform we exist on.

Through thick and thin, we've been a constant presence in millions of people's lives over seven years. And we're going nowhere, even if priorities start shifting and changing.

You have been there through it all, from college dropout to newbie developer, from aspiring bot developer to seasoned downtime expert, from small-time hobbyist to running a team of 12 exceptional contractors. Thank you for being there.

It's no secret that we've made significant game design mistakes over the years. I'm not afraid to admit that I had to fail my way into learning what works and what pisses people off. Given the unique nature of the Discord bot industry and being a self-taught game designer and product owner, I will continue to learn hard lessons.

But through the grace of our fantastic community, we'll keep chugging along the railway of indie game development. We'll continue to remedy past mistakes while simultaneously creating new experiences.

• Branch out past Discord to develop games for people to enjoy inside and outside the Dank Memer ecosystem.
• Correct mistakes of the past within our power to correct, without jeopardizing what we've built.
• Adapt to user feedback openly, accepting all viewpoints with unique importance without compromising our goals and values.
• Create unique experiences and support players of all types, empowering small and large communities alike to thrive with our help.

• We plan to make at least one Steam/mobile game in the first half of 2024 with Dank Memer themes that are not directly tied to the bot economy.
• We plan on introducing old systems, such as gambling commands and random events, back into the game to add more fun things to do for people looking to blow off steam.
• We plan on working towards a Dank Memer update schedule that balances having fun new things with less confusion around changes.
• We plan to introduce new systems for people who like to collect unique things, such as trading cards, new items, new badges, and more.
• We plan to continue supporting our fishing system long-term with regular content updates and new features.
• We plan to modernize our website to include a new design and more community-central features like a server dashboard and a server list for Dank Memer servers to advertise themselves.
• We plan on simplifying the game by doing better tutorials and less complicated systems to help people play more easily.

Your feedback, both in the most recent survey and for literally years previous, dictates where we take this game. Keep giving us feedback and chances to grow, and we'll keep serving you a game you can play whenever you need to blow off some steam and have fun with friends.

Thanks for the fantastic year and all the great memories. We'll see you on the other side.