I want to thank all of you for your participation in Sturmovikfest 2020. With the success that I saw this year, I can’t help but think that this will be the first in what will become an annual event. Thank you all for making that happen.

Thank you for everything!

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This inaugural year went beyond anything that I had imagined with special events, content releases, giveaways, special skins, and so much more happening all across the community.

I want to do my best to thank as many people as I can for making this happen. To the server administrators, operators, moderators, and all of the other people who help make IL-2’s multiplayer servers happen – thank you. Thank you to Combat Box, Jasta5, Finnish Virtual Pilots, Knights of the Air, The Unprofessionals, RS Squadron, and The Grim Reapers for supporting the events on your servers and through various special events and fly-ins. We couldn’t do this without you.

I want to thank people like ROCKET_KNUT who did the brilliant A-20B festival skin and Raptorattacker for his equally brilliant P-51D and Bf109K-4 skins. You guys helped provide an incredible visual strength to the community events and particularly to the mass formation events that we had.

Speaking of which… I want to thank JimTM from the IL-2 forums who not only proposed the mass formation idea but then took it and ran with it. This required an incredible amount of coordination and Jim made it happen!

I want to thank everyone who was streaming the various events or who mentioned the event on their YouTube/Twitch channels. Wolfpack345, Rhyn0, I Fly Central, MagzTV, Daedallus, grij_torero, DBS Thor, Requiem and the Air Combat Tutorial Library, and likely more than I forgot or don’t know about. Thank you all for your support!

A special shout-out to everyone who did giveaways. People like Rhyn0, Requiem, and many more did giveaways for Collector Planes and entire IL-2: Great Battles Series titles. There are many more who approached me privately or posted on the forums and I can’t possibly list everyone but I want to acknowledge the generosity on display. You’re all helping get people involved in the series and that is an incredible thing.

I want to of course thank 1CGS for making a series that we all know and love and Jason Williams for being supportive, giving the event a shout-out, even making sure that a well timed sale happened around the event.

Finally, I want to thank everyone for supporting the idea, participating, or otherwise somehow being great on this whole thing. With so many of us locked down, quarantined, or otherwise staying away from friends and family, this was an event to help us forget some of our troubling times and make some positive memories. I really think we did that. Thank you!

Videos to check out

Here’s a list of videos that came out of this week that you might want to check. I may add more here as I discover them!

Still coming soon

Running Sturmovikfest and keeping up with the rest of my life this week prevented me from doing the other part of what I wanted to launch as part of the festival – the Stormbirds Podcast.

Doing everything proved to be just too much for me to do all at once so I had to delay but I hope it will be worth it in the end.

Two episodes (or rather one introduction and one actual episode) are more or less done while a third episode, a Q&A with Jason Williams, is still to be recorded and I hope to have a lock on that one soon once time and schedules allow.

So stay tuned for that and a couple of other announcements as we head into May!

Your thoughts?

Sturmovikfest was an idea partially borne out of the current circumstances that nearly every one of us is facing. That said, this is hardly the first virtual festival to take place, and I’m interested to know what you think. Were you able to participate in any of the events or enjoy some of the live streams? Should we as a community attempt another festival next year? Let me know in the comments!