What do you think of membership charges? Have your say here.

[Hot Trout]

A topic that has come up over the past few months (on the old forum) and one which is important to be discussed is the problem of funding the cost of running this site and its forums.

Good News / Bad News
Since we moved to our own dedicated server the good news is that we have unlimited bandwidth, uberfast connection speed, dedicated support and backup, 100's of GBs of storage and total flexability. The bad news however is that the cost of running the server us now close to $200 per month and that is as long as we stay under our 1500GB download limit. Once we go over 1500GB a month there are additional charges.

Now many people do donate and for this I am very thankful but the fact remains that for the majority of months this site costs me personally quite a lot of money. This is money that I can no longer afford to payout.

Advertising is one means to help make ends meet and there are currently non forced adverts on the main website but again these are not enough.

What I am proposing is to charge you the users a small amount for your membership. This could be a monthly subscription or one off payment. It would allow you access to the ROM downloads and remove any limits on concurrent connections, speed or amount of bandwidth used. It is also possible that this would remove all adverts for paid members. Suggestions for the charge could be :-

Daily -- $1 (minimum 2 days)
Monthly -- $5 (minimum 1 month)
Yearly -- $35
Lifetime -- $80

* These charges could also be based on download quantities, MB limit or suchlike instead of dates.

At the minute this is still just an idea that I wish to discuss fully in detail with all of you and one which I need your feedback on. There are problems with membership fees the main one being, how to allow access to roms for those people that can not make a payment (under 16 years old, or no online account). I do not wish to limit the material to anyone, particularly the younger members. My intention is just to produce enough income to pay for all the costs and maybe allow us to improve on the server.

I open this to the floor and ask you all to get involved in this debate. Please also register your opinion with the poll.

[Guest]

Ouch. Umm well, I can see both sides of the blade.
I do agree with the costs. The stuff just isn't cheap. Which is a huge bummer. Cause right now this place is fantastic, just needs a little boost and the name needs to get out to get some more members. Just needs involvement.

My view though (which probably doesn't seem very nice) is I don't wanna pay for a site. Idk I just hate it, It feels wrong if you know what I mean. I'm a big supported of here, and if this actually happens ill just end up doing it cause Ive found my one true love .

Id say load the place up with adds to pay for it because as of right now or soon if you started charging, your still not going to get much because the member count is still low. And adding a pay for me sign might deter others from joining. But I also could be completely wrong.

From my experience though, if I went to download something and I had to pay, I went elsewhere and found an alternative because on the internet, there is ALWAYS and alternative. Which is both a pro and a con.

So all in all, I agree and I dont. My advice is just be wary of the outcome of the actions you choose to make.
(Haha sounds like a warning. My bad. Its not though)

[Manually Installed]

I don't want to have to pay to download, but if I had to I would. The above price list isn't too bad.

If we have to start paying I wouldn't be able to do the reoccurring pay thing, but I could definitely go with being able to select the amount of time I wanted to download and pay the set price.

[Hot Trout]

I appreciate the feedback here. Can I just say that, in Feb I receiced a total of $60 in donations. It actually cost over $200 for that month.

Unless people really start to donate and help me keep this site free I will have no alternative in the future but to charge a small amount to everyone. Interestingly if everyone was to donate that uses the site, each person (at present) would only have to pay approx $0.05 each . Unfortunatly only 1 in every 20,000 visitors actually make a donation and even then some people actually donate as little as $0.13. What is the point in $0.13.

Ho hum ... back to work.

[illusions]

Hello All

Recently joined your site and loving the old memorabilia << (If i spelt that right.) Your topic

I own a gaming site to which ive tried many ideas regards Payments and other options and ive found when it comes to parting with cash some people are tighter than a gnats nuts lol..

However you could use the forums to its full potential and give a points system for games to be downloaded..

example when people post they Gain say 5 points for a post and go to the rom download section to see which files they can download for the 5 points theyve just earned

[Guest]

Hello All

Recently joined your site and loving the old memorabilia << (If i spelt that right.) Your topic

I own a gaming site to which ive tried many ideas regards Payments and other options and ive found when it comes to parting with cash some people are tighter than a gnats nuts lol..

However you could use the forums to its full potential and give a points system for games to be downloaded..

example when people post they Gain say 5 points for a post and go to the rom download section to see which files they can download for the 5 points theyve just earned

Thats an interesting concept. It would insure that join and contribute. The problem I again see with that though is the amount of work people have to go through to get what they want when there are tons of other sites that are just click and download. A point system would make this site more exclusive for those that already know what it is and others on the outside would have to be determined to get in.

[Hot Trout]

Having thought about this a little I am warming to the idea of a points or token system. Upon registering users would get a number of tokens free to get them started. Each rom would have a token cost assigned to them based on their KB size. This would then allow me tocontrol GB download amounts. In other words, for example, if the ROM was 100kb in size it might use 1 x token but a ROM 1MB in size would use 10 x tokens.

Users could then earn tokens for posting on the forums, leaving comments about the roms (this is based on the new database I am writing for the ROM's which will allow stats to be recorded, comments to be left, a score from 1 to 5 to be voted and pictures to be uploaded for every rom), scoring a rom or writing a review.

If required users could also purchase tokens using paypal at a very low rate which would in turn help fund the site development.

Definatly sounds like the way to go. What does anyone else think.

[Guest]

Now the way your putting it makes it sound alot better than what I was thinking. Its a very good idea.

[Kherr]

Hmm... how to go about this...

I'd have to say that I'm reluctant to the idea of having to pay, but I can see that this site will go belly up if monthly income isn't improved. I've already donated 15 bucks, but that isn't enough. I'm hard pressed as it is, which is the story of most people online. They're already paying $xx.xx or even $xxx.xx monthly for their internet, so why should they have to pay a re-occurring fee here, or lifetime membership? I'd probably jump on the yearly bandwagon for generated revenue for you since I have been coming to TOC for approx. 2 years now, but I think the best option is a per-download cost, something like $0.05 per download. I'm not gonna cry over $1 because I got 20 games for that price. That's definitely do-able... and with your projected 1.9 million page-views per month, that's a lot of nickels.

I also like the point system... say one point per post on the forums, and offer the rest on PayPal... Now, the games could cost like so:

All Atari/NES/Colecovision/Fairchild/Odyssey/Vectrex/Intellivision: 10 points per download
GB/GBC/Virtual Boy: 15 points per download
SNES/GENESIS/GBA/Turbo Grafx 16: 25 points per download
PC Abandonware: 50 points per download
The Rest of the older PCs: 5-50 points per download

The going rates for points thru PayPal could be:

$1 for 100 points
$5 for 750 points
$10 for 1,750 points
$20 for 4000 points
$50 for 12,500 points
$100 for 30,000 points + BONUS 2,500 points free ($15 value).
All prices based on USD currency and roughly 30 minutes of thought given to said point system.

Using the above system, it would cost you 9,130 points to download all of the CURRENT (913 games) NES library, which equals $50. (either way you slice it, two $20 amounts and one $10 amount OR one $50 amount, you get the same price for the points necessary)

Now you could also offer a system's ENTIRE LIBRARY for a discounted amount of points... like 8,000 points ($40 USD) for the CURRENT (913 games) NES library...

Who wouldn't pay $50 (or $40 if you go the "bundled discount" way) for the ENTIRE NES library PLUS some SNES games? I would jump ALL OVER that price.

(Yes, I said GBA earlier, and I seriously think you should offer that section as well, large following there)

[Hot Trout]

The more I work through the site, the more I think the tokens or points system is the best. It allows those users that can not pay (underage, no paypal, no accounts) to earn tokens from site participation, then download their earnings. Those of us who have a little disposable income and do not mind paying an acceptable amount for tokens can then jump the queue and get what we want. No one is excluded and the end results should be a more vibrant site and sufficent income to support the bandwidth use and server costs.

I do think that tokens should be based universally on the total data size downloaded. That way then, small roms are automatically cheaper than large roms.

Thanks for the post, keep the ideas coming.

BTW : The Gameboy advance ROM section is in production as we speak, it is the entire GBA collection, over 18GB worth.