Money Money Money aka Selling Out

Jan 05, 2012 - by Strom

So it turns out that running a state of the art system for thousands of players isn't free.
Who would have thought?

All the money that DotA-GC generates is spent on the following tiers:
1) Paying the bills (It currently costs about 110 euros per month for the servers alone.)
2) Having prized competitions & buying advertising to get more players
3) Giving some sort of compensation to the people who actually build & moderate this commmunity
4) Profit

Thus far the income has never even completely covered the bills and as such I have paid most of it for almost 5 years. I am in no way bitter about it, it has been a wonderful experience. However moving forward, the wish of the community is to grow the player base and that will also make the bills bigger.

I am actually willing to increase my investment in GC, by spending more time building out new features & growing the player base. However my time isn't free, the opportunity cost is huge. I could be spending this time doing something else, something potentially more lucrative. Still, GC is a fine path to take, but GC would need to become self-sustainable and even generate hope of someday turning in a profit.

So how can DotA-GC possibly make any money? Well currently we have the premium name changes, which have proved to be successful. Still, they help only a little. I will probably look into adding some more premium features, but for now I will be adding advertisements to the website. The site has been ad-free previously because I hate the cheap punch-the-monkey ads. They're annoying and don't bring in any money. I will try to find some better advertisers, but in the beginning there may very well be some of that annoying shit shown on the site. Also, if anyone sees any ads with sound, let me know and I will ban that ad. I hate sound effects on ads so much.

The future. How long will DotA-GC last? I will pay for it myself for at least another 3 months. During that time I will try hard to make GC self-sustainable, meaning that GC can generate enough income every month to keep the lights on. Should I accomplish that, GC will be online for as long as it pays for itself. Keeping the lights on and adding new features are two completely different things however. I will add support for new dota map versions for as long as GC is up and running. Anything more than that will depend on if I see any hope of future profit.

Finally, for those of you that want to help with the bills directly, I have added that option. All the money received via this will go directly to the payment of server bills. Thanks!