Related Links: http://www.southerncrossgaming.org/contribute.php
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A lot of people have asked this before so I figured it'd make some sense to put it up on the forums. How does SCG handle money from donations?
Donations come on the occasion, usually a few times per month, with no specific average as the collected amount adjusts per month. These are kept in my personal paypal account as everything is automatically set to take from that. It costs roughly 100 dollars a month to keep things going, this includes the 3 tf2 servers, a minecraft server and two seperate file / data servers. **[color=orange]Wow it actually costs around $200.00 a month now, that is the master server that keeps all the games on it, the data server and the download server. [/color]**I normally cover most of the cost from funds I collect from various jobs, and donations only cover around a 5th of that.
Do we NEED donations to survive?
Yes we do! While I do pay for stuff out of my own pocket, donations are important and help things move along.
How do you manage costs?
200 dollars per month pays for the web servers, the download server, and the SCG servers themselves. Rather than pay per server, we have one master server we run everything on. This gives us full control over everything we do, and allows us to hold temporary servers at no cost.
We used to use per server hosting plans, this stopped due to quality problems / lack of file control.
Do you accept games?
Yes! But only on two conditions, if it's a game in my wishlist / interested in getting a server for, or if it's a game that can be given out to someone in the community as per a raffle or something. On my account, the logic I have here is that if it's a game I intend to get at some point, or a game that I want to get for the sake of hosting a server on, then it's money I will end up spending, therefore, getting it in place will leave me money that I can then use to pay for the server. I'm welcome to argue that logic however!
Will you ever add pay to win benefits?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvdf5n-zI14[/youtube]
What about future concerns, popularity, advertising, etc.
You can't stop a group from growing, and we meet a lot of cool members, cool players, so I'd never want to stop. But I'd never go out of my way to advertise, the rate at which the group grows now is perfect, it's small and manageable. I'd rather take the time to advertise a personal experience with a few people then write up generic advertisements with a targeted audience. That's what finks do, and I ain't a fink, dig?
I don't want to remove that message, however, we will be doing small advertisements due to problems we've had with group activity as time went on.