So, if you look at the Patrons Page. It shows that we have 89 Patrons coming in at $750 a month. If we look at the google documents sheet that shows the SS14 Patreon Spending, we can see where that money is going to.
It’s actually a really difficult document to read through because to spite having the amounts and dates; it’s not exactly organized into a monthly bases. So, for the purpose of this example, I kind of have to mock up a sort of on the fly monthly example because the document doesn’t. Also, the most recent months don’t have complete information. So, that makes getting a more current picture difficult to determine.
The last demarcated Paypal Transaction Free was all the way back on May 11Th of 2021 at $20.00. There is a space for a more recent one on May 12Th of 2023 that says “TODO.” We can see that the next one back from 03/11/2021 is November 2Nd 2020 at $16.77. So, it did go up $3.23 from 11/02/2020 to 03/11/2021. That still makes a current price difficult to guess.
When I google “what percentage does Patreon take?” I get this answer. “Patreon makes money by taking a cut of all creator earnings generated through the platform. Patreon currently takes between 5% and 12% of creator earnings (plus a payment processing fee), depending on the product plan chosen by the customer.”
Does this means 5%-12% of the total income on top of the $20 that had already been stated? Sense I have no idea what “product plan” was chosen by the customer; the best I can do is guess. So, I will, for the sake of this demonstration, guess at the highest value of 12%. Again, without all the information, all I can do to make a report like this is guess.
So, let’s do some math. The current Patreon Pull is $750 a month. At 12% that means $90 a month is going to Patreon itself. That leaves $660 a month for other things. It looks like in the google doc sheets that there are only 4 entries for paypal transaction fees. So, I am going to assume this is proceeded about once a year? If so, that would be (using the example of $20, the last listed price) 20 divided by 12 to get the monthly $1.67. So, $90 + $1.67 = $91.67. $750 - $91.67 = $658.33.
So, where does $658.33 go a month? Again, that’s not really easy to figure out based upon the google docs sheet. Because nothing is really organized by month; even though the Patreon Pull comes in monthly. Instead, it’s all just thrown onto the sheet and dated in a list.
So, let me try to reconstruct. The only thing listed for the entire month of May for this year is Bee Hosting at $16.24. But, I doubt that’s really the entire server cost for the entire month for all the servers. From my best guess, then, I doubt the server costs are billed monthly. Because they populate the list in a very sporadic way rather than in a regular way. This makes it very difficult to understand how much money a month goes to server hosting and paypal fees. About the only sensible thing to do, then, if I am going to make a monthly pie chart is to lump about a year’s worth of server hosting into a giant year long pool and then divide it by 12 to get a monthly cost. But, even that isn’t the easiest thing to do from this list. It looks like servers hosting might have changed so it’s kinda difficult to ascertain what costs are still relevant and which are outdated to be considering for a current monthly cost pie chart. So, here’s a wild guess at it.
We really shouldn’t be using 2023 because 2023 is not over so it is not complete. So, I will be using 2022. That said, that likely doesn’t match up for the amount of Patrons and Patreon Pull that we currently have. But, without a complete set of more modern numbers and with everything just being thrown on a sheet as it comes in, it’s the best I can do with the information that I have to work with to at least create a hopefully somewhat accurate monthly Patreon Expenditure Pie Chart.
Okay, so further reading in the sheet looks like the fees are applied as the money is withdrawn and listen in the chart on that date. So, I will disregard factoring in the last Patreon Fee of $20 as if it were a yearly thing and then dividing it by 12 for a monthly fee. Because that doesn’t really look like it applies that way. Instead, I will simply use the estimated 12% across the board. Again, this could be as low as 5%. I have no idea what it really is.
What this gives me is an estimated 20.39% of Patreon Dollars going to Hosting. Hosting, here, being a sort of catch all because I don’t really know which thing is used for hosting what. There is server hosting for the game, as well is web site hosting. So, which is what between Reliable Site Hosting, Bee Hosting, Invision, and Name Cheap is not stated. I tried doing a quick look into each of these and from what little I can tell they are all ‘hosting’ of some form or another.
Honestly, the google doc sheet doesn’t tell me much. Does all of the Patreon funds go to hosting and Patreon Fees? Does anything at all go to paying the developers for developing the game? Because all the Doc Sheet shows is money coming in (sometimes, really just early on in the doc sheet) and then money going off to these four hosting platforms. Nothing is listed as ‘paid developed John to develop X feature for the engine’ or ‘paid developer Betty to create new outfits for Clown.’
So, when you call me entitled for complaining that my donation money is not spent correctly it’s pretty misguided (nice word for me to use) on your part. I’m severely disappointed by the fact that there is only one official US sever that ever gets close to well populated; and it’s full most of the time. I have to sit out there refreshing to try to get in. While the only other official English speaking server that comes close is Miros which has about 15 people, if you’re lucky. That isn’t well populated; that is a joke. The fact that a Project Manager suggested that to me as a solution to my problem is an even bigger joke. This all compounds even worse for me when it appears that the only thing the Patreon funds really go to is server hosting. So, at $750 a month you’d think that would be enough to fix the problem considering it doesn’t look like any of the donation money goes to paying for engine development or content development. If it does, nobody bothers to list it in the google documents SS14 Patreon Spending Sheet.
If only 20.39% goes to servers/site hosting, and none goes to engine and content development; outside of Patreon Fees, where does this rest of this money (the vast majority of it) actually go to? Does it just sit there as a fallback emergency option in case the Patrons stop donating to keep the servers on with?
It just seems odd to me that money is spent on keeping mostly dead servers up with 15 or 20 or less people (again if you’re lucky) while US West often tops out at 80 people. Should there not be a US West 2; considering that seems to be where most people are playing?
![PIE CHART.PNG](/uploads/default/original/2X/1/13680132c690a2bb991fd3a1190faf4ed0cc14b0.png)
SPACE STATON 14 MONTHLY.ODS (66.4 KB)