[2020] A Year in Recap and Season Greetings news

Hi.

We hope that all of you are safe and healthy. The year of 2020 is finally coming to an end, so here is our traditional "A year in Recap" post for you. Below you can find the summary of what has happened during this year and a handful of other things that might be interesting to you.

Surely, it is hard to mention this year without mentioning the COVID-19 pandemic. Many lives were lost and millions of people had to deal (and still cope) with the consequences of the disease. The pandemic had locked many of us down in our homes and forced us to change our lifestyles.

• These were the times when MTA:SA had seen the biggest number of players ever recorded. The achieved popularity growth still seems to be present even today, when you compare this year's numbers to the ones from a year before.
  
  
• April has marked the third anniversary of the opening of our Discord and a lot of things have changed since then. We have introduced more regional channels and made it easier to contact our team if you had an important matter to discuss. We have also made it easier for new users to check and accept our Discord Rules in their language. Our server has over 15.000 members nowadays (even after a little miss-click on the Purge users button during the year 😂) and we are still working towards getting even more members.
  
  
• Some work has been done on reviving the AMX Compatibility Layer module. It can be used for running the existing PAWN gamemodes, filterscripts and plugins in MTA:SA. There is a public beta build for the Windows server if you would like to try it out. The module is open source - so you are more than welcome to contribute to it too.
  
  
• We have released Multi Theft Auto: San Andreas 1.5.8 in October. The changes in this release were mostly community contributions, improvements and bugfixes. It took us more time than usual to publish it, as nearly 407 days have passed since the last release. We hope that it was a polished enough build to be worthy of the wait.
  
  
• Aside of that, we have been experimenting with doing some MTA:SA related streaming on our Twitch channel for a while. Woovie has done an excellent job on these streams and covered a bunch of topics, such as the community servers and gamemodes reviews, Lua scripting and doing code reviews and QA. If you have not seen them, we have put some of them on our YouTube channel.
  
  
• Our Forums were overhauled this year. In addition to that, one of our community members has recently made a brief post about how the Forums have changed over the years. It is nice to see that there are people out there who are interested in the historical side of things too.

[DM] Disaster ft. BriaN - ABZU by Gerc & others

Bullet physics in mta, progress by CrosRoad95

MASSACRE | NON-STOP MTA DAYZ by supraaa & others

MTA Racing Tutorials || PART 3 || Useful ways for San Andreas racing. by Vilgefortz & others

MTA: SAAW Star Wars - Kamino map pre-Alpha rare leaked footage by Einheit-101

MTA: Lumiverse: Atlas - Server - Dashboard (In-Depth Analysis) by lumiverse

Rabbit hunt script for MTASA with extra map & skin mod by "Press start to begin" / True_Killuminati

! Epilepsy warning ! [DM] NeiT Vol.9 - Image Distortion by RRecords & others

• Recent peak number of concurrent unique players: 38 696 players on 2020.12.19 (at 18.00 GMT)
• Highest recorded number of concurrent unique players: 52 098 players on 2020.04.02 (at 18.00 GMT)
• Recent number of daily unique players: 153 033 players on 2020.12.20 (Sunday)
• Highest recorded number of daily unique players: 185 818 players on 2018.02.03 (Saturday)
• Recent number of monthly unique players: 647 317 players on November, 2020
• Highest recorded number of monthly unique players: 805 903 players on January, 2018

The numbers are slightly bigger than in the last year. Some of the records were not beaten, but were a really close call. For example, nearly 800 000 unique players had played this year in April! And our recent concurrent unique players peaks are bigger than our last year's records for that.

How does this compare to modern games, you may ask? You can check it yourself by visiting the Steam Stats page. Powerhouses like GTA V, CS:GO, PUBG and Cyberpunk 2077 have much higher peak players numbers, but we are surely close to some of the other well-known games - for instance Civilization VI, Terraria, Euro Truck Simulator 2 or Garry's Mod. We are even surpassing the recent player counts of games, such as Left 4 Dead 2, Europa Universalis IV or Borderlands 3 (at least on Steam).

MTA:SA version or series - Percentage of players using that version or series as of 23rd of December, 2020

• 1.6.0 (alpha; custom) - 0.1%
• 1.5.8 - 98%
• 1.5.7 - 1.7%
• 1.5.6 (and older) - 0.1%
• 1.4.x + 1.3.x - 0.1%

The latest versions are the most popular ones so the version fragmentation is not much of a problem.

In terms of the mod development, we have been mostly monitoring the situation after the recent release for now. We have also received some nice contributions from the community developers, like the work done by fastman92 to improve MTA:SA's compatibility with fastman92 limit adjuster. Patrik has been putting a lot of effort into designing the new Community site - we would love to see those designs replace the old site one day.

Team-wise, we are in process of doing major inner changes in order to improve the transparency and the quality of our work. These changes will be hard to notice at first, as they are strictly related to our Team's organization and policies (they will especially affect the Moderators Team). After a while though, you might be able to see their effects for yourself as well.

-- MTA Team