Lately Patreon (thanks to Farel for the suggestion!) is becoming more and more used by small, independent gaming websites to rise support and monthly donations to be able to pay the site server and to create better content. Some good examples are HG101 and Tiny Cartridge.
Patreon lets readers support their favorite websites by becoming patrons, giving a small donation every month, automatically through paypal / credit card. Unlike other fundraising services (for example Kickstarter), which raise lots of money for a single big event, Patreon is for creators who publish online a stream of smaller works, like website updates, articles, researches, and need just little money every month. Empowering a new generation of creators, Patreon is bringing patronage back to the 21st century.
The new server that hosts Unseen64 costs about 300$ a year. U64 is an independent site. No money is generated from our work so we must pay each and every server bill ourselves, with the help of a few awesome supporters. Some years ago we had Google Adsense banners that helped a bit to get money to pay the server, but then Google banned us because we write about prototypes and rom-hacks, even if we don’t host those files on our server.
If you want to help Unseen 64 to survive and if you can donate some of your love every month, we would like to try to rise monthly contributions through Patreon. You can just donate how much or little you want, and you can cancel your pledge at any point if you’re low on cash or have a change of heart. Every cent is really appreciated and sent towards the U64 Archive. Patreon takes 5% and the creators cover the credit card transaction fees which are generally 4%, so we would see around $0.90 of every dollar.
We’d like to open different Milestone Goals, so for example if we are able to get 25 patrons to donate 1$ a month, we can pay the U64 server for another year and write weekly updates, if we are able to rise 100$ a month we could publish an Unseen64 Book with articles and insights about cancelled videogames (something like HCG101’s “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers”, but with more engrish), if we are able to rise 2.000$ a month (LOL), we could pay our best contributors for more good articles and work on Unseen64 24/7 for daily updates on the site, deeper researches on lost videogames, create videos, interviews with forgotten developers, etc.
We also would like to offer special gifts for people that donate more than 1$ a month, for example we could share exclusive / early access videos with people that donate 10$ a month, to send a physical copy of our (potential) U64 book to who donate 25$ a month, to work on dedicated articles and special requests for who donates 50$ a month, and so on.
Before to organize a Patreon account, we’d like to do a poll to see if this idea could be useful to support Unseen 64. What do you think? Would you support U64 trough Patreon with 1$ or more a month? What would like to see as “special gift” and “Milestone Goals”? Give your vote and comment below!
