Developer Blog - Nexus Finances

[Kandarin]

Nexals,

It’s worth being transparent with the community about how the site is hosted and funded, so here’s a brief summary of how the Nexus works money-wise. A lot of Nexus Clash players once played Nexus War, a game that had to be taken down for financial reasons because the developer was running over a thousand US dollars in the red every month and it was posing a serious threat to his personal finances. We’d like to dispel the thought that either something similar is an imminent risk (it isn’t) or that finances are never something we have to think about as a site (they are). So without further ado, a quick summary of what Nexus costs, how it’s funded, and where the money goes.

Costs

Nexus Clash currently costs $118 a month in hosting costs, or $1,416 per year. $82 of that is hosting and backup services on the main game that everyone plays on. Another $7 is hosting and backup of the wiki. Another $7 is maintenance of the old archive.nexusclash site, which is necessary for returning players to be able to retrieve and transfer their accounts (a thing that still happens sometimes). The remainder goes toward upkeep of the development-server environment for testing code in a controlled environment, as well as a deployment system to keep dev code changes flowing to the dev server - and which tells devs when something isn’t working (and sometimes even what). We don't anticipate changes on our end that will increase costs, though changes on our host's end mean that our monthly hosting costs are about 50% more than they were this time four years ago.

The lion’s share of our costs are hosting, but one small additional area of expense has been art commissions - while some developers may enjoy AI art as a hobby, as a team we strongly believe in using real human artists as much as is reasonably possible, so there have been commissions from the site’s finances for (for instance) the main front page art for B5 and B6 and a couple of other major things of similar importance. The B6 art was made by the same fantastic artist who did the B5 art, there have been some areas (skill art) provided by art packs we’ve purchased in bulk (though I think many/most? of those may have been bought by a dev personally). A lot of day-to-day art (new character avatars, tiles) have been made internal to the dev team without any money changing hands, especially by Jelly Moon.

The development team is entirely volunteer-based. No devteam member has ever been paid for doing Nexus Clash development.

Finances

Nexus Clash hosting is supported by player donations, which are handled through Paypal. We had an awkward four-month difficulty in 2023 when Paypal changed their rules to only permit registered charities (which we are not) to use a "Donate" button, which meant we had to take the button down and it took us a while to communicate correctly How to Donate in the absence of an obvious button. Paypal is still a very good service and its downsides (some fees, unavailability in some countries) are shared with all of its peers, so we’ve kept using it despite the slightly less convenient interface.

Unfortunately, the four month gap in 2023 led some players to think there was no longer any way to donate at all, which simply isn't the case as we've gotten this worked out since with the link above.

We have received $697.25 in donations in the 13 1/2 months between clarifying how to donate in the post above and the time this blog post was originally written (December 1, 2024). Some of this is Paypal fees, and that's more than a year so the amount per year is a bit lower than that. When a donation is received, everyone on the admin team gets an email about it and whoever gets on it first applies credits to the account that the donator named in their donation message.

Obviously, that amount of donations gained is less than our current costs per year. There have been past years in which donations have exceeded costs, which built up a reserve (though that has been running down ever since) and has meant that we haven't had to run close to running out of funding internal to the site for a long time. There is enough either in reserve or prepaid to our host that the site probably has about a year and a half of hosting covered from that remaining reserve. Our host also only takes funds from our Paypal when we prepay them in bulk, so there have also been times when we neglected to do this and the hosting costs unintentionally wound up being directly funded by someone on the admin team instead of from the site's finances. Needless to say, devs have bills to pay too so we've gotten better at spotting and hopefully preventing this in the future by prepaying before what our host has runs out.

Hopefully this clears up a lot about how the site is run and where your donations go. We are always grateful for the generous support of the Nexus community, which goes toward keeping the game world that we all love running.

Thanks,
The Nexus Clash Development Team

[Kandarin]

When this post was drafted, one question that came up in dev channels was what policy we have for future transparency, having posted something like this once. A lot of sites run by professional dev teams of highly skilled tech professionals for whom the site is their full-time job have big monthly, or quarterly, or annual financial transparency reports. We're a site run by a small team on, as noted above, a purely volunteer basis. We have no way to guarantee that any given dev to whom making posts like this could be assigned will even be here in a year, and thus no way to make ironclad promises to keep posting at highly predictable intervals.

That said, laying out the basic facts with a snapshot of recent numbers is better than never doing it at all, and I think it's fair to say that we'll post an update if the costs-to-donations ratio gets meaningfully better or worse, or if finances start posing an existential threat to the site - which as above, they currently do not.