IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT
I come bearing news, both good and bad.
The Good News
The good news is that we’re just hit 78 votes on our November Community Rim Pack survey, more than any of the previous surveys, It really makes me happy that people are showing a lot of interest in this project, since July people have been suggesting, voting and helping out with finding good reference material. And in this time span, I’ve had the luck of finding extra financial backers as well, Drift and @ProfessorP3PP3R have been helpful with getting the surveys prepared and getting the packs financed. And Venom has been doing a wonderful job at creating wheels for us.
However…
The Bad News
It comes with difficulty that I have to announce that the future of the Community Rim Pack project is uncertain. And that we’ll be looking into a Patreon based Crowd-Fund solution.
There are several reasons for this, but in the end, it all comes down to financial backing.
Venom has been supplying us these past 3 months with great mods (Of which the Community Rim Pack is just one), all of which have been commissioned by people of the automation community, these were paid for on the basis of work done per hour. We (Me, Pepper and Drift and Venom) have discussed these rates, and have come to the conclusion that they will have to be raised over time in order to make it worthwhile to keep doing commissions for the game.
These raised rates mean it will become more expensive to maintain the existence of the Community Rim Pack project. And we’re left with 2 options:
Option A - Carry On:
We accept that the hourly rate is going up, and stretch out the pack/survey releases to once every 2-3 months. But putting a lot of financial strain on the 3 current backers, which will then eventually still lead to the project grinding to a halt.
Benefits:
- The Pack will continue to exist until the release of the November pack, after which we’ll probably have to start thinking about reducing to 1 pack every 2-3 months, or stop the project entirely.
- Nothing else.
Option B - Crowdfunding:
We ask for the community to help fund the future of the project by resorting to crowd-funding (Patreon in this case) We will be setting goals for the Project, and the people who decide to fund us through this will get more influence on the contents of the pack.
Benefits:
- It becomes an official project, not just an agreement between like-minded people who just wanted to see more content. It will be able to continue indefinitely once we get enough funding to do so.
- Patrons ill get extra benefits, we’re currently still discussing specifics, but may include stuff like dedicated discord access, early access, suggestion priority, personal wheel picks, etc.
- We’ll be able to set specific goals for what we want to do in the future, expanding into different types of content (More Wheel Categories, Fixtures, Bodies, etc.)
- We’ll have a dedicated blog keeping you up-to-date on everything related to the Community Rim Pack, survey standings, sneak peeks and progress reports will be posted there as well as here.
Summary
In the end, we hope that you agree that option B is the best for everyone, we’ll be able to pay Venom fairly for his work, and we’ll continue to get the awesome content in return to enjoy and explore our creativity in automation.
We hope you can understand why we are resorting to crowd-funding, as it still is just us as the 3 backers at the moment. And this is the best option to make it affordable for everyone in the long run.
What Can I Do?
You can help us right now by answering the poll in this post, this is so that we can estimate if we can get enough to keep the project alive, please answer it honestly. If you are unable to help fund the project, please do not vote for one of the options to do so.
Once we get up to enough votes we’ll start considering our options, we might be able to start up the Patreon to continue the project as it is with no major changes, or we might be able to down-size it in order to keep it alive in the hopes that we might be able to get it back up in the future.
Either way, the only way we can be sure is just to wait and hope that we’ll get enough in the end.
What will happen if there are not enough patrons?
I’d like not to have to think about it, but if we can’t get enough patrons, we’ll have to resort to option A. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Poll: If we set up a Patreon account, how much would you be willing to donate per month in order to keep the Community Rim Project alive?
- I am unable to provide backing / become a patron.
- € 1.00
- € 2.50
- € 5.00
- € 7.50
- € 10.00
- € 15.00
- € 20.00
- I am able to provide more than what is listed here.
Please answer it honestly, it’s no use choosing an option if it ends up giving us false estimations about how much funding we’ll actually be able to get. I’ve set the vote to public, so that we can contact you once the Patreon goes live, don’t feel stressed out though, every little bit will help out in the end.
Finally, We’d like to thank everyone once again for participating in this project, over the past few months we’ve been able to get out great content, fine-tune our rim pack survey and get content into the game that the community really wanted to see. And I hope that we’ll be able to keep doing just this.
– Quotex, ProfessorP3PP3R, Drift and Venom
P.S. This post will be followed by our regular progress updates.