The Game Fund - Updated: 1st January 2004

As you are aware, we are increasing the gaming content on the site at a steady pace. Not only in terms of reviews and articles but also in terms of the amount of software we are making available freely for you to download that we have negotiated for with different companies and our own original software titles. However, all of this costs money and we are looking for help in funding this and bringing you bigger and better downloads.

This is where the Game Fund comes in. The concept is fairly straightfoward - the Game Fund will be a pot of money that we will reserve exclusively for improving the gaming content of the website. Primarily, this will involve investing in a number of areas of the site to enhance what we offer already and to improve our capacity to run the site more effectively.

Please take the time to read this file carefully - it will help to explain our current dilemma, how we plan to improve the site, and just how YOU can help and make a difference to Infinite Frontiers Online.

In terms of all the money raised for the Game Fund, it will be used in three main areas...

Bandwidth And Storage

Because of the nature of the free downloads, they place a strain on our storage space and bandwidth used, so an element of the fund will be used to ensure that we can host all the games we want, expanding our storage space so we can keep all the files online at all times, and have enough available bandwidth so you can download whatever you want whenever you want. We currently have 1Gb of storage space although as we get more files, we will find that we will need to increase this dramatically which we can do in increments of 250Mb. We also recently received a flood of publicity which has seen our hits to the site grow at an astonishing rate. We are now getting over 20,000 hits a DAY to the site and to be honest, if people were to download most of the software, it would cripple the site.

In fact, we have had to spend a considerable sum on buying additional bandwidth in the short term just to keep the site going, and we have also had to temporarily remove some files from the site to ensure that we can keep the site online. With your help (and funding from advertising), we won't need to keep anything offline and we will be able to cope with all the download requests that we receive. At the moment, at the current rate and with the files we have available, we estimate that we will need in excess of £500 a month to fund the site at the level we want to maintain - not an easy task to accomplish without YOUR help.

Licencing Software

Secondly there are some companies that, for different reasons, won't allow their old games to be given away freely, but who are willing to licence their older titles for distribution by us for a fee. Naturally, we will still make these titles available at no charge, but we need to find the money to cover this somewhere. We already have one or two companies that we are talking to about this and while we don't have the funds at the moment, we are at least getting an idea of what costs are involved.

Original Work

Finally, we have ideas for original products that we would love to see developed on a range of platforms and if we can find spare funding, we can look into bringing you brand new titles for the PC, Amiga and other formats that will be exclusive to Infinite Frontiers. Obviously to do this we'd need to find appropriate development teams, but if the money is there, it will be worth it!

Naturally, the big question you are probably asking is how are we going to raise the money to make this happen to the level that we really want? At the moment, we can see this coming from a number of sources, but there are a couple of main areas where you, the visitor, can have a direct influence on.

Donations

We are not asking for massive donations from anyone, but if everyone who downloads files from us on a regular basis could afford a small amount, we'd be able to raise money quickly to offer more value online and to ensure we have the capacity to handle the demand. What we will say is that with all the titles we are trying to bring you, no matter how small or large your donation, the commercial value of the files that you'd be able to download freely would be MUCH higher than any amount you might care to donate. At the time of writing this, we have software that had an original retail price of well in excess of £1,000!!

In terms of the current hits we are receiving, if just 10% of the people visiting the site and downloading files in a single day donated just £1 each per year, that would see us raising a staggering £2,000 - enough to buy us 1,000Gb of bandwidth - enough to keep the site running at maximum capacity. Please don't think that we will get enough donations so you don't need to - every amount helps and even just a couple of pounds helps us add an additional gigabyte of bandwidth to our capacity.

To give you a better idea, if you decided to download every single game file and application that we have on the site, it would probably require over 500Mb of downloads. Now, if you could afford just three pounds - an amount that most people wouldn't really notice - that would more than cover our costs for hosting those files and we think that a couple of pounds for access to that many files represents exceptional value for money.

Affiliate Schemes

We are also using some affiliate schemes on the site that are helping to raise money. Some of these offer payments to us if people sign up from a link on our site to an email newsletter etc. In other cases, we get payments for each click that someone makes on a banner. For example, we have a banner advert on a couple of pages on our site from a company called Gadget Hub (found in the Miscellaneous and Computing pages). If you haven't already clicked on this, please do so as every bit of money helps. Also, in the Disability section on a couple of articles we have an ad from a holiday firm. If you click through on this and sign up for their free email newsletter, again we get a small payment.

At the same time, we also have a pay-per-impression deal running on the main index. Each time one of these banners is displayed, we receive a small payment. Individually, these don't really count for much, but over the course of a few months, this will mount up considerably.

Advertising

The final option for us is advertising. We are trying to book taking banner advertising etc. across the site and money from this will help us fund our activities even more. We are approaching a number of companies offering them advertising deals and hopefully these will help us to boost the Game Fund. If you know of any companies who might be interested, they can find out more on the "Advertise With Us" feature on the main site menu.

If you decide to make a donation to Infinite Frontiers via PayPal and you would like that money to go completely to the Game Fund rather to our general running costs, click on the button below, and put the words "Game Fund" in your message and the money donated will be reserved specifically for that purpose only. As we generate more money, we'll be able to offer more and as we reach set targets, we will be able to add more to the site and give you a better gaming experience.

We will keep you posted on how the fund is progressing here, as well as bringing you details of new deals we are negotiating, new advertising and sponsorship partners, and how close we are to bringing you specific products freely. Also, if we have any other updates or news in general on the Game Fund, we'll let you know here.

If you have any comments or suggestions about the game fund, or have requests for software for us to make available, please don't hesitate to get in touch or use our forum. Also, we can be contacted by our usual email address, InfiniteFrontier@aol.com or you can write to us by snail mail to Infinite Frontiers, PO Box 8966, Great Barr, Birmingham, B43 5ST, England.