First off, I've sent out an email to cash prize placing entrants requesting payment info, so prize money will be going out soon.
NESHomebrew wrote:infiniteneslives wrote:What carries the weight is what the community wants to spend compo funds on.
On this topic, I think a donation to NA/NESDev to help with hosting was discussed at one time. Should we poll that, or is it a no-brainer?
From what I recall NA has an annual fund raiser for hosting fees, anyone know when that is? I've reached out to whoaman in the past, but it's worth doing again.
I'll put together another financial report ~month after action53 volume3 release. Not much has changed in earnings since the
last report where we had ~$2k, only a few volume 2 cartridge sales since. We spent a close to $1k on printed materials for upcoming volume 3 release, and we're dropping ~$1k for cash prizes now. I purchased the sega/famicom bitboxes as well, but I won't count that as an upfront cost, I'll just bill it into the per cartridge earnings like I do with all other cart costs. So effectively at the moment we're probably pretty close to zero balance.
Moving forward I'm sure volume 3-4 and subsequent carts will bring in significantly more funds than volumes 1 & 2 did. To date vol 1&2 have funded the upfront publishing costs of vol 3, and prize cost of vol 4 which is pretty impressive IMO. We don't have a lot of spare funds at the moment, but that's due to the double whammy of not getting past volume released prior to next compo ending which falls on my delays in publishing. Not a big deal, that all will soon change with volume 3 release. I'm also going to be pushing harder to get vol 4 released prior to this holiday season.
So once I put out the post vol3 release financial report we can evaluate diverting some of those funds to hosting fees and such.
Also, could someone with forum superpowers make a 2018 compo category. Time to start thinking about the future...
What do you mean exactly? Do you mean coming up with a 'special title' for
volume 4?
More precisely, i didn't mean for it to publish as a physical release at all (i don't see it being worth it for the same reasons you gave) but rather have it as a pdf zine since that requires no other investment than "just" time. Price would more likely be in the range of 0.99 to 2.99 usd depending on contents per issue. Maybe first issue free. It'd also have a clear % of contents dedicated to code modification tips/how to make the most out of nesmaker, which i think is more in line with what this crowd would want. Then the gain (if any) could be an addition to the fund. But if it's too thematically detached, i'll let it rest.
I don't mean to diminish ideas like this but I guess I'm having a hard time seeing how some publication like this would tie in with the compo & carts. I guess part of it is, personally I'm not really looking for more ways to earn funds as the action53 cartridges earn plenty of money to fund the compo. If a project of that (or any) nature were in need of funding and the community wanted to divert action53 funds towards a separate project I'm perfectly fine with that. But I'd rather not have money coming back into the action53 funds as that would now be a whole separate business activity I need to account for and manage taxes etc.
Last idea i had in mind would be to do a custom-painted cartridge and let it go on auction each year. Not much of an addition to the funds in itself probably but still something. Attaching an example of a cartridge i painted for persosnal use. Choosing colours and theme for such a cartridge could be based on that years' winner, maybe.
I like the idea of the custom painted cartridge, but there are mixed feelings on auctions for limited edition homebrew releases. If we were to do an auction like this I would prefer the auction proceeds go to charity. The compo funds could cover the material costs and then donate the items being auctioned so 100% of earnings would be going towards the charity. I feel the action53 sales are more than strong enough to support follow on compos. I'm expecting we'll have excess funds that we'll need to figure out how to invest back into the compo and community as a whole.
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers