Unseen64 Donations Details - September 2016 (Patreon)

We have updated the donations amount with the funds raised in September 2016 , as always you can find all details in our dedicated page: http://www.unseen64.net/how-to-help-u64/donations-details/

• Preservation Fund @ August 2016:
  Total: $3,253.49 (from Patreon + One-Off donations)
• Patreon Donations in September 2016
  • +$235.00 Processed 
  • -$14.18 CC / Paypal Fees
  • -$11.75 Patreon Fees
• Paypal Donations in September 2016
  • +$6.80
  • -$0.87 Paypal Fees
    
• Expenses in September 2016:
  • $854: Unseen64 book project, physical expenses - the whole cost to print proof copies and to ship worldwide dozens of copies of our book to all the authors who wrote many good articles for the project, plus to ship a copy to 3 Gaming Museums (the Center for Computing History in UK, the Computer Spiele Museum in Germany and the National Videogame Museum in Texas, USA) so that our research on lost games will be preserved in their archives too. This expense is about $200 more than what we estimated 2 years ago when we started working on the book, but we are still happy to have been able to keep the cost of the book as cheap as possible, thanks to thousands and thousands hours of volunteers work by the 45+ authors and editors that contributed to the project.
  • $110: Unseen64 book project, design expenses - the cost to pay the designer that helped us with the book layout, adding hundreds of pages to the template, editing and formatting the volume following Createspace guidelines and limits.
    
• New Total for September 2016:  $2,504.49

Planned Expenses:

120$ per year = to upgrade our Dropbox space to 1TB (cost: € 8,25 per month, about 9/10$), then to upload all our Unseen64 archive of images, files, videos and documents in there, to have a single, dedicated online backup to preserve all those files and to manage an easy access to them for our patrons. This online archive will cover all the lost games already published on Unseen64, plus all the ones that we still did not add to the site yet.

About 500 $ = as we wrote before we would like to invest part of the donations to create even more Unseen64 video-articles every month. We know that today most people don’t read gaming reviews on websites anymore and just rely on video reviews from Youtube. For “historical” websites like Unseen64 is just the same, there are many more people that would watch a 10 minutes video about a cancelled game, rather than to fully read a 1.000 words article on the topic. Just like in the past gaming magazines have been replaced by gaming websites, now youtubers are taking the mass-market lead for videogames reviews, news and historical researches. While it would require more time to create a good video article (especially as the main Unseen64 is italian and we have to find other people for voice-overs), it would reach many more users than 3 or 4 written articles. We will test this from August to December 2016, when work on the Unseen64 book will be good enough to permit us to create about 2 more video articles each month.

About ??? $ = as we wrote before we would like to test investing part of the Preservation Fund to incentive authors to write more articles each month, to archive more and more games in the site. We will test this in the future, when work on the Unseen64 book will be good enough to permit us to use some time for extra updates on the site.

Before to start to rise donations for the Unseen64 server 2017 (from August 2017 to August 2018, we will probably start at the end of 2016), future donations will be set aside in a "Preservation Fund", for emergency site expenses.

• About 1,884.49 $ = as usual we will open a discussion on Patreon when there will be possible expenses, for now this amount remains in the Preservation Funds for future needs.

We think that this is not our money, the use of donations in the Preservation Fund is discussed with all the contributors that help to preserve lost videogames in the Unseen64 online archive. We keep this page updated each month, so you can track down how many donations will be raised and how they will be used.

Big gaming networks such as IGN or Kotaku have the resources to own powerful servers and to pay a team to work full-time on their websites, keeping their sites online and publishing daily updates. We don’t have their resources, but we think we have something better: we have you, a community of gamers that know why it’s important to remember beta and cancelled games. Thanks for your support!