Note that the linked Patreon post is locked to supporters only.
In the post, I lay out the exact breakdown of costs for each service we pay for, as well as the exact breakdown amounts we have earned over the past year from Patreon.
I also pose a potential for a poll on what supporters would like if we end up exceeding costs for long enough.
The public info that is already on our Patreon about page:
This month the earnings are about £70 / $88.88 / €81.16
This months costs are £54.17 / $68.82 / €62.86
Note that this month’s earning amount is actually above the average from the past year, so it’s possible that this will go down if some supporters leave.
If you want to be a part of the potential poll deciding the fate of said funds, you should consider becoming a supporter. This would enable options like:
Upgrading the server hardware
Increasing resilience against downtime
Increasing the pool of money to hedge against months where our earnings are below costs
And as a supporter, you will also get access to private / custom lobbies, exclusive zombies abilities, join/leave messages, reduced antispam in-game and the supporter role on Discord.
As i stated before, i would rather do several one-time (or one that it several times more expensive than monthly) purchaces instead of signing for 1 month for patreon
That would be impossible. If we gave out perks forever, people would stop paying and we would close due to running out of funds.
And also, the amount we pay also goes UP over time (inflation and the like). The subscription model is the only way to be realistic about supporting the server.
Lifetime licenses and the like are on the presumption that there’s always new people that will pay. A lot of people that have opted for such things have either moved away from them or closed down because it is not sustainable.
I mean if, for example, make custom/private (only, greets and antiantispam are better suited for monthly, i agree) lobbies like 20 pounds, i think it will make more profit so
Anyways, i am not buisnessman, so act as you see needed, but the problem is that you never know whether are you gona use -c/-p perks in next month so making them perma-thing sounds more consistent
That’s actually worse. Custom / private lobbies are essentially you indirectly renting server resources. If enough people did it (as in, fixed lifetime amount, not subscription) we would actually run out of resources and people would either get annoyed that they paid for something and can not access it, or the people that are not supporters would be incapable of playing zombies because all the supporters are using the resources.
Or make a patreon-light subscription (without private zombies lobbies, only access to special channels, greet texts, and reduced antispam) for a bit less than the full subscription. So the patreon light subscriber does not use any additional server ressources (I think that the size of a ingame chat message is somewhere in the low Kilobyte range or even less than a kilobyte; Spammers are banned) additionally to the full subscription
The advantage of it being subscription based is, let’s say that over a period of 6 months we get 20 new supporters who all play zombies at the same time but in their own private lobbies. That would mean during that period each month we also get +20x patreon price in funding, and that money can go directly to covering the costs of the extra hardware needed to support those people.
It ensures that we can always provide the same service regardless of how many or how few supporters exist.
For a comparison, we used to have lifetime perks, and most people never payed more than once. We had to rely on very few people who would give us larger amounts, like $50 to pay for a month or two in one go.
I planned to later split the perks into tiers, but only once I’ve added enough value to the current one that it warrants doing so. There are still a few things that need to be implemented first.
Its good that patreon is working out. Thank you for the updated information (I thought you were only going to give the statistics monthly to supporters).
I would also like to know the progress that has been made on the zombies abilities. I know the focus has probably shifted to custom mob waves (TJ has seemingly been working very hard on it), but if you have any updates on the progress of them I’d like to know.
I believe Patreon only offers that setting to creators that have been pledged equal to or greater than a certain monthly amount.
I imagine this would also include early-access to zombie abilities as that would be the biggest incentive for people next to the lobbies if I had to guess. Depending on how much less this subscription would cost, I don’t see many people opting for that one instead of the full one otherwise.
I’m not sure if this falls into what is covered in the supporter post, but is there a general outline/goal set to achieve for that additional hardware to be met? At what point would things cross the line of maintaining the server and put simply, “improving” it?
Creator account must have a well-established payment history, including at least $200 in earnings per month in the previous three months.
Once there is a sufficient margin between cost and earnings for an extended period, I will hold a poll on Patreon for people to vote on what it should be used on. It would likely be one of:
Upgrade to more powerful hardware
Upgrade resilience - this would mean money goes towards backup services etc to ensure that if a server is offline it has less or no effect on people’s ability to play
Add a new server location - this would be mostly seamless and wouldn’t split players at all, but could reduce ping for players who are currently far from our current server location by getting them to join lobbies in their own region for example (but would not include PvP / PvE / Survival, they would still be from the main server)
Save money to reduce risk of hardware downgrades in the future
The threshold for what it means to be above is essentially the cost to have these options available, which I would put at roughly £20 above costs.
There hasn’t been any recent progress on the abilities. Necromancer has an implementation but I didn’t find it interesting enough to use in its current state.
