SWGEmu Finance Update June 2023

[Lolindir]

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

[jonasthekill]

I appreciate the transparent communication!

Been bouncing in and out every few months as I love watching the development and seeing things progress, but this really sucks to see. I know it's not much, but added a $15/month donation in hopes it can help! Figure this is essentially the same as a monthly sub but it is going to a good cause for a dedicated and passionate team instead of a **** billion dollar corporation that provides mediocre support.

[Cliffy]

So in the beginning with the $15k balance aside that has quickly dwindled....how was it so high? Were the cost increases over the last year that much more substantial or has the donations dropped that much? Whats the cash flow look like for the previous few years? This is what i do for a living... what did it look like at the last couple years on Bas?

$15k was a huge buffer to have so just wondering how it got to that point and now draining so quickly.

I'll be honest the transparency and lack of community input is a HUGE problem with this project. I spoke to LK on the side about this a while back and told him I'd like to see them do some sort of senate where there is a rep from every part of the game ie a crafting reps, pvp reps, pve reps, newbie reps, etc. This along with a community mamager that listen to the community input.

These things have been ignored over the years. I love you guys for the work you put in the project but....if you want us to be invested too especially those of us who have no computer knowledge, it needs to feel like OUR project too. It doesn't.

[nazoreen]

Sorry, but I think you must choose europeans services, it is less expensive than US services. And about Slack, well there is free opensource solution. About domain, you could pay 8$ for a dot com with other provider, not 12$ with Google. I think you must rethink all services and choose open source solutions. About cloud hosting, really, check europeans services, you could win about 20-30% less for different services. About GIT, for 70$/year with O2switch, you could have an hosting for the website, forum and GIT server.

[makednoce]

In game survey is awesome. It reminds how much we love the game. Once every two weeks i would expect to show up. Sadly it is hard year for both players and dev team. Stay in good health. It"s only money.

[shilo]

So in the beginning with the $15k balance aside that has quickly dwindled....how was it so high? Were the cost increases over the last year that much more substantial or has the donations dropped that much? Whats the cash flow look like for the previous few years? This is what i do for a living... what did it look like at the last couple years on Bas?

$15k was a huge buffer to have so just wondering how it got to that point and now draining so quickly.

I'll be honest the transparency and lack of community input is a HUGE problem with this project. I spoke to LK on the side about this a while back and told him I'd like to see them do some sort of senate where there is a rep from every part of the game ie a crafting reps, pvp reps, pve reps, newbie reps, etc. This along with a community mamager that listen to the community input.

These things have been ignored over the years. I love you guys for the work you put in the project but....if you want us to be invested too especially those of us who have no computer knowledge, it needs to feel like OUR project too. It doesn't.

There is another server "that shall not be named", who does communication extremely well. They have a well oiled organization, discord is used as a conduit for information between developers and players. They also have a player senate, they vote on changes and game direction. Senators are community members who are voted in or out of the senate. The senate is based in Theed, and this allows for communication between the player base and the developers.

[Jay Forerunner]

What makes this suck is that I felt like I was on a good start to joining staff, and now the thread is talking as if outright shutdown may now be in the cards.

I won't blame you if you feel a mandatory subscription is required, though with my absolute zero income, that's not something I myself would be able to sustain on my end.

If there's anything I have to add, for some form of "better than nothing" option, there should be one of the dev's local builds available as some kind of museum, with god mode powers and all, for players to go through in single-player isolation. And it'd need to be packaged in such a way that even a noob like myself can run it on his Windows OS (none of the Linux nuts-and-bolts). It wouldn't be the definitive experience, but at least it'd be preserved in some form, and keeping a multi-gig sized package file on some cloud like Google Drive is a lot more cost effective than overhead for humongous and complex servers for the full MMO experience. If this pitch doesn't fly, again, I don't blame you, I'm only trying to help.

Semper Bellum!

There is another server "that shall not be named", who does communication extremely well. They have a well oiled organization, discord is used as a conduit for information between developers and players. They also have a player senate, they vote on changes and game direction. Senators are community members who are voted in or out of the senate. The senate is based in Theed, and this allows for communication between the player base and the developers.

P.S. this place does have a Discord server, and I'm vastly more active there than I am on these forums. I even get to talk to some of the staff there once in a while. I understand you may presume we don't, but the invite is somewhere in this forum...you just need to know where to look (or how to search for it)...

[chebyo]

So you are saying that unless people start coughing up donations the game will shut down?

If we had more community involvement in the direction of the game (as mentioned above) then I think people would be more invested and likely to donate.

The work you've done on getting this far is really impressive and it would be a shame to shut this down when you've not exhausted all possible options. You've got to see community involvement as a positive thing going forward because the people playing are what will keep this going. Also one of the biggest things putting people off is the constant threat of a server wipe, it does not convince people to stick around and that will definitely be affecting their willingness to donate.

[Mozzer]

Sorry, but I think you must choose europeans services, it is less expensive than US services. And about Slack, well there is free opensource solution. About domain, you could pay 8$ for a dot com with other provider, not 12$ with Google. I think you must rethink all services and choose open source solutions. About cloud hosting, really, check europeans services, you could win about 20-30% less for different services. About GIT, for 70$/year with O2switch, you could have an hosting for the website, forum and GIT server.

with out sounding like a D@@K you have a great point if they are renting a server the eu server base is as low at 47.3% less than the cheapest us server that is able to keep up with the demands of the server, that being said i do not see them changing over to eu/uk based server as most of the player base and staff are based in the Us and i do not see 80% of the server playing on 100-150 ping just to save some money.

but have you guys also though about buying a server ? there are accouple on the market that will easy be able to keep up with all 3 server's that you are hosting and the player base for around 3k with discounts 2.7k. then all you would need to do is host the server at someone's house and install a business line to there house. in the uk you are looking around 120-250 for the electric and 110 for the business line..


also would you be able to post the new server setup/spec's from when you changed to amazon services ??? as you went from 20$ to $2k would love to see the upgrade that you got from that ?

[Jeremai]

I like the game as it is. Involving community for sure is a good thing but if i see some of the future server ideas and all this discussions about other server are better cause tis or that, i personal fear server going that direction will drive me out the game.

[lordkator]

I've had some people contact me and try to make the case it's this feature or that feature etc.

First, the project, in general, still moves towards a pre-CU server. This is the 1.0 milestone for the project.

Second, yes, we test other ideas on Finalizer, but the pure pre-CU code is still in our repo and is being worked on regularly.

Third, we had an influx of players when Finalizer launched (new server smell). At the time, I predicted it would fall off in 90 days, and sadly it did. We didn't do anything in those 90 days; the new server smell wore off. The reality is this game died because there is no end-game, and shock, surprise, we experienced it again with the launch of Finalizer. About 10% of the population sticks around, and the rest go back to Wow or Minecraft.

Here is a broader horizon of contributions if this helps, we've been in the red for a long time just the bump we got in 2021 helped us navigate that:

+---------+-----------------+-------+-----------+----------+--------------+----------+--------------+

| YYYY-MM | Total Donations | #Subs | #One Time | Amt Subs | Amt One Time | Avg Subs | Avg One Time |

+---------+-----------------+-------+-----------+----------+--------------+----------+--------------+

| 2021-01 |         1640.00 |    58 |        34 |   845.00 |       795.00 |    14.57 |        23.38 |

| 2021-02 |         1731.00 |    59 |        28 |   880.00 |       851.00 |    14.92 |        30.39 |

| 2021-03 |         1741.00 |    62 |        30 |   875.00 |       866.00 |    14.11 |        28.87 |

| 2021-04 |         2845.00 |    62 |        24 |   915.00 |      1930.00 |    14.76 |        80.42 |

| 2021-05 |         1535.00 |    65 |        13 |  1075.00 |       460.00 |    16.54 |        35.38 |

| 2021-06 |         1150.00 |    61 |        16 |   865.00 |       285.00 |    14.18 |        17.81 |

| 2021-07 |         1710.00 |    60 |        22 |   840.00 |       870.00 |    14.00 |        39.55 |

| 2021-08 |         1055.00 |    58 |        13 |   835.00 |       220.00 |    14.40 |        16.92 |

| 2021-09 |         1352.40 |    63 |        18 |   930.00 |       422.40 |    14.76 |        23.47 |

| 2021-10 |         1270.00 |    58 |        14 |   880.00 |       390.00 |    15.17 |        27.86 |

| 2021-11 |         1130.00 |    59 |        13 |   885.00 |       245.00 |    15.00 |        18.85 |

| 2021-12 |         3275.00 |    67 |        50 |  1005.00 |      2270.00 |    15.00 |        45.40 |

| 2022-01 |         3531.00 |    71 |        48 |  1015.00 |      2516.00 |    14.30 |        52.42 |

| 2022-02 |         2980.00 |    78 |        60 |  1130.00 |      1850.00 |    14.49 |        30.83 |

| 2022-03 |         2376.00 |    80 |        34 |  1155.00 |      1221.00 |    14.44 |        35.91 |

| 2022-04 |         2355.00 |    72 |        29 |  1055.00 |      1300.00 |    14.65 |        44.83 |

| 2022-05 |         1770.00 |    68 |        24 |  1110.00 |       660.00 |    16.32 |        27.50 |

| 2022-06 |         1480.00 |    65 |        19 |   970.00 |       510.00 |    14.92 |        26.84 |

| 2022-07 |         2185.00 |    56 |        19 |   825.00 |      1360.00 |    14.73 |        71.58 |

| 2022-08 |         1485.00 |    54 |        19 |   805.00 |       680.00 |    14.91 |        35.79 |

| 2022-09 |         1340.00 |    51 |        15 |   730.00 |       610.00 |    14.31 |        40.67 |

| 2022-10 |         1200.00 |    49 |        18 |   700.00 |       500.00 |    14.29 |        27.78 |

| 2022-11 |         1660.00 |    49 |        24 |   735.00 |       925.00 |    15.00 |        38.54 |

| 2022-12 |         1620.00 |    50 |        11 |   755.00 |       865.00 |    15.10 |        78.64 |

| 2023-01 |         1260.00 |    48 |        16 |   745.00 |       515.00 |    15.52 |        32.19 |

| 2023-02 |         1129.50 |    46 |        12 |   720.00 |       409.50 |    15.65 |        34.13 |

| 2023-03 |         1320.00 |    51 |        14 |   795.00 |       525.00 |    15.59 |        37.50 |

| 2023-04 |         1055.00 |    49 |         9 |   775.00 |       280.00 |    15.82 |        31.11 |

| 2023-05 |         3015.00 |    53 |        65 |   945.00 |      2070.00 |    17.83 |        31.85 |

| 2023-06 |         1365.00 |    22 |        36 |   350.00 |      1015.00 |    15.91 |        28.19 | * Partial

+---------+-----------------+-------+-----------+----------+--------------+----------+--------------+

[vasilij]

I know it most likely aint many of us - but is it possible with a payment option that dosnt involve Paypal?
The only donation options requires it to go through paypal, with or without an account.

[lordkator]

I know it most likely aint many of us - but is it possible with a payment option that dosnt involve Paypal?
The only donation options requires it to go through paypal, with or without an account.

We use Paypal as our primary system of record, we've thought about other things like Patreon etc but then it gets messy reconciling across multiple services etc.

Is there a specific reason you won't use Paypal even without an account?

[vasilij]

We use Paypal as our primary system of record, we've thought about other things like Patreon etc but then it gets messy reconciling across multiple services etc.

Is there a specific reason you won't use Paypal even without an account?

I understand the difficulties and administration it requires to run multiple services, so the choice of going with a single solution does make sense.
Obviously i can only speak on my own behalf, but I have several times clicked the donate button just to check if there were other/new options to help everything on tracks.
If you keep the survey pop up running, try adding a question if people would donate if there were another payment option - just to get a rough idea if it would be worthwhile.

As with all choices there is ofc. a reason behind - but that is personal and nothing that concerns the public

[Ebak Zarr]

We use Paypal as our primary system of record, we've thought about other things like Patreon etc but then it gets messy reconciling across multiple services etc.

Is there a specific reason you won't use Paypal even without an account?

I despise PayPal because I’ve had my card and bank information stolen through them. Large amounts of money were transferred from my accounts during my house purchasing process. Big pain in the ***. Would never have used them again, but the donation here was PayPal only. I felt dirty afterwards. Now I’m watching my account like a hawk for who knows how long.