2019 started with an announcement from our Publishing arm that GMG was partnering with the legendary Stainless Games, the developers behind Carmageddon, to launch a new IP - ShockRods this summer. We also got news that we made it as Finalists in the International Growth Retailer and Best Retailer under £250m categories at the Retail Week Awards 2019. To top this, we were also named one of the most productive retailers by Retail Week in this year's list.

As part of London Games Festival in April, our CCO Martin Baxter, presented a giant cheque for the sum of £30,000 to the charity GamesAid as part of our Gaming for Good campaign. The proceeds for the charity came from the sale of our GamesAid 50 bundle at the end of last year.

We partnered with Ubisoft to introduce automatic Uplay key redemption allowing our customers to redeem their games quicker and adding an extra layer of security. In the UK, we proudly joined forces with the Defence Discount Service and The Blue Light Card to offer the UK military community, emergency services, NHS staff and their families an exclusive extra discount on top of our already great prices.

The publishing team had a very busy year of launches with titles such as Stormworks: Build and Rescue and War Tech Fighters launching on PC. We celebrated our 8th birthday with a big birthday extravaganza on our store - 8hr deals, 24hr deals, mystery gifts and extra savings and of course an after-party of even more discounts. Our first-ever charity bundle was launched in August together with GamesAid and 18 very generous publishers with 100% of the proceeds going direct to the UK charity. And we made it as Finalists for the eCommerce Awards 2018 - Best Customer Service and Best Specialist categories!

We bagged our very first Retail Week Award and made it to the Top 30 Growth Retailer of the Year list. In March, two big technical projects were launched: our first local language website in German and our new community platform. Our tech team worked so hard to deliver both projects on deadline.
The new community platform delivered a new-look forum, in-depth game stats and facts, game reviews and the ability to watch popular Twitch streamers all in one place.

We launched the Intel Software Distribution Hub powered by our technology and built for game publishers and hardware resellers and also signed a partnership with Lenovo to offer our storefront on millions of laptops worldwide through the Lenovo Entertainment Hub. The Publishing team's game, The Bunker, was nominated for a British Academy Cymru Award (BAFTA Cymru) and Green Man Gaming won The Best Electronics, Computing, DVD, Film, Games, Music and Toys eCommerce Company of the Year. We were very proud to be identified as one of London Stock Exchange Group's 1,000 Companies to Inspire Britain celebrating the UK's fastest growing companies. We ended the year by launching two more local language websites for the Latam markets in Portuguese and Spanish.

To coincide with the launch of our new look website (V3.0) we unveiled our new logo and brand identity. The alf lost his body but he looked fresher and modern for 2016.
The Green Man Gaming team took part in a lot of charity events organised by Special Effect, the charity that puts fun and inclusion back into the lives of people with physical disabilities by helping them play video games - something that's close to our hearts. Paul and Callum were part of the Twin Town Challenge and drove from Oxfordshire to Le Touquet in France to raise money for charity - some of it in their green suits.

The store raised money for Special Effect by participating in 'One Special Day' where we donated all our proceeds from the sale of select games to the charity. The publishing team launched adventure horror video game, The Bunker, which was featured on the BBC's Click programme. We made it into Deloitte's Top Tech 500 EMEA lisit and The Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100 list.

We teamed up with Nintendo to offer digital Wii U and 3DS titles on the store with games such as Super Mario Maker and The Legend of Zelda: A Link To the Past making it into the catalogue on launch day. We were extremely honoured to be awarded The Sunday Times SME Export Track 100 (Ranked 53rd on the list) recognising Britain’s SME companies with the fastest-growing international sales.

We also got The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 award (Ranked 23rd) where we were up against other private tech companies with the fastest-growing sales. At the end of the year we were rewarded once again with two big Awards: the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 (Ranked 22nd on the list) and the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA (Ranked 116th) acknowledging the fastest growing tech companies in the UK and EMEA. It was really a year of awards for us as Catherine Anderson, today EVP of Finance and Daniele Thillmann, currently our SVP Head of Risk and DPO, were included in MCV’s Top 100 Women in Games list.

Our proprietary digital trade-in technology was patented in the US allowing customers to trade-in their games on the store at the time. We launched Green Man Gaming Publishing, then known as Green Man Loaded, to support indie game developers with bringing their games to market in a crowded marketplace, leveraging our marketing and trading expertise.

As headline sponsors of the Golden Joystick Awards, we helped to drive a staggering 9 million votes by the public across all categories. Paul was awarded Silver in the GB Entrepreneur of the year in Retail Awards and selected as one of the most influential people in the UK Games industry in the MCV Brit List 2014. We also won our first eCommerce Award - the Pureplay eCommerce Retailer of the Year. In December, our customers were able to use Bitcoin to pay for their games (no longer available)

We sponsored the Golden Joystick Awards for the first time and gave everyone who voted a free game to boost participation. It worked. We delivered a record breaking 10 million votes by the public.
We were proud to be part of the first ‘Future Fifty’ list by Tech City UK, a fast-track scheme for high growth tech companies that the British government is earmarking to IPO. Following this, Paul (our CEO) was invited to join David Cameron’s delegation to China to represent the UK games industry.

We were also included in the Silicon Valley Comes to the UK (SVC2UK) 100 Club. The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 put us on the Ones To Watch list.

In July, we acquired global gaming community platform, Playfire, deepening our relationship with gamers worldwide.

We launched Version 2.0 of the store website and offered three free games for one day in The Sun newspaper reaching almost 7.5 million people.

The site went live in May with a few hundred games from 26 publishers. We launched with a penny game sale and within the first few hours we were surprised by the initial rush of customers from Japan and India. This was the moment we knew we had to think global instead of going with our initial strategy of focusing on Europe first. We were global from the start.

The idea for Green Man Gaming sprung up in 2009 when our founder, Paul, was catching up with Lee, one of the founding members of the company, at the ‘Green Man’ pub in Riding House Street in London. They were talking about the future of the games industry and what gamers wanted from a digital platform. What was missing was a platform that allowed gamers to buy and trade-in their games in one place so they went ahead and built it. Green Man Gaming Limited was set up officially in September in a very small office in Bloomsbury.