SWGEmu Finance Update June 2023
June 2023
SWGEmu Team
The team has finally recovered some from our infrastructure move in January, and we decided it was time to review our finances in light of the new expenses related to our move.
As previously mentioned, we had a very nice deal from packet.net (about 60% off list price), which expired in November, and we were forced to find a new hosting provider. Our primary focus was to keep the project online and move to a provider with flexibility and high stability. We've managed to migrate successfully, and our systems are starting to stabilize.
Now as we look back, we are focusing on the survival of the project under these new circumstances. We ran a 12-month analysis of our costs (see below) and realized we have been running in the red too long. At this rate, the project would run out of funds by July!
In response to that, lordkator wrote a system for in-game pop-ups to remind active players about donations. This had a very positive impact, we received $3,080.00 in donations in May (200% over April).
However, since our move in December, lordkator has also carried some costs directly on his own personal account (TC-Prime, Sauron, Nova, Jenkins), so in reality, we're still a bit under water.
With this in mind, we decided to reduce the size of the server Finalizer runs on by 1/2 (ram and cpu), we made that change on May 3rd and while we're still waiting for all of May's costs to clear, we estimate we saved about $1,400.00 of cost.
Our estimates are if we can get our donations to about $2,500.00 we can move the rest of our services into the primary account. If we could hit $3,200.00 per month, we could move Finalizer back to a bigger server to help with lag and uptime.
The most striking result of our analysis is that in April, we had 2,352 active accounts playing on Finalizer. However, only 30 of them actually donated, and overall we averaged $0.43 (43 cents) per active account in donations.
We also launched an in-game survey for people who don't donate. The current results as of this post are as follows:
Count % Response
499 42% - I can't afford to donate.
187 15% - I'm just visiting.
180 15% - Don't know how to donate.
170 14% - I don't use paypal.
137 11% - Yes, but I don't want to donate.
1,173 100% - TOTAL
These are distinct accounts, also, the survey updates automatically here each hour. Detailed analysis of the survey is available in Use the data Luke... Donation Survey Analysis - June 2023.
And last but saddest of all, our trailing 12-month financial analysis:
We are still whittling away at some costs, but the bulk of our costs are not fungible, and thus without community support, we will have to make more hard decisions, including shutting down some or all of our services.
Thank You,
~SWGEmu Staff
