unseen64

Would you support Unseen64 with Patreon for 1$ a month?

Would you support Unseen64 with Patreon for 1$ a month?

Lately Patreon (thanks to Farel for the suggestion!) is becoming more and more used by small, independent gaming websites to rise support and monthly donations to be able to pay the site server and to create better content. Some good examples are HG101 and Tiny Cartridge.

Patreon lets readers support their favorite websites by becoming patrons, giving a small donation every month, automatically through paypal / credit card. Unlike other fundraising services (for example Kickstarter), which raise lots of money for a single big event, Patreon is for creators who publish online a stream of smaller works, like website updates, articles, researches, and need just little money every month. Empowering a new generation of creators, Patreon is bringing patronage back to the 21st century.

The new server that hosts Unseen64 costs about 300$ a year. U64 is an independent site. No money is generated from our work so we must pay each and every server bill ourselves, with the help of a few awesome supporters. Some years ago we had Google Adsense banners that helped a bit to get money to pay the server, but then Google banned us because we write about prototypes and rom-hacks, even if we don’t host those files on our server.

If you want to help Unseen 64 to survive and if you can donate some of your love every month, we would like to try to rise monthly contributions through Patreon. You can just donate how much or little you want, and you can cancel your pledge at any point if you’re low on cash or have a change of heart. Every cent is really appreciated and sent towards the U64 Archive. Patreon takes 5% and the creators cover the credit card transaction fees which are generally 4%, so we would see around $0.90 of every dollar.

We’d like to open different Milestone Goals, so for example if we are able to get 25 patrons to donate 1$ a month, we can pay the U64 server for another year and write weekly updates, if we are able to rise 100$ a month we could publish an Unseen64 Book with articles and insights about cancelled videogames (something like HCG101’s “The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers”, but with more engrish), if we are able to rise 2.000$ a month (LOL), we could pay our best contributors for more good articles and work on Unseen64 24/7 for daily updates on the site, deeper researches on lost videogames, create videos, interviews with forgotten developers, etc.

We also would like to offer special gifts for people that donate more than 1$ a month, for example we could share exclusive / early access videos with people that donate 10$ a month, to send a physical copy of our (potential) U64 book to who donate 25$ a month, to work on dedicated articles and special requests for who donates 50$ a month, and so on.

Before to organize a Patreon account, we’d like to do a poll to see if this idea could be useful to support Unseen 64. What do you think? Would you support U64 trough Patreon with 1$ or more a month? What would like to see as “special gift” and “Milestone Goals”? Give your vote and comment below!

 

Unseen 64 Community Forum Test!

As we wrote a couple of weeks ago, we are trying to find the best way to have a new U64 Forum without the main problems that the old forum had, especially to have it on the same server as the main website and the risk to lose all the discussions (as it happened when we had to delete the old forums) . We collected all your feedback and even if there are some concerns about using Facebook Groups as a community forum, there are some nice features that are super useful for us and we’d like to do a test to see how it will goes.

So we created the Unseen 64 Community Forum with FB Group group, to work together to search for beta and cancelled videogames, to discuss about them and to get in contact with other unseen games fans. You are free to join and post new discussions, ask for help to other unseen games fans to find and share more info, screens and videos.. what we’ll be able to achieve? If this test will be successful, this group could be the new official U64 Forum! We are waiting for you :)

unseen 64 forum 2014

 

The new U64 Forum?

U64 Forum

Do you miss the U64 Forum? We are trying to find the best way to create a new forum, but we need your feedback!

As the old U64 forums were on the same server as the main site, they used a lot of resources and to moderate them was time-consuming.. also, as the U64 forums had to be removed from the U64 server, they are not accessible anymore.

So we are thinking about to use a Facebook Group as the new U64 Forum: that will not take any resource from the main U64 server and even if U64 will go down again, at least Facebook will stay online and the “forum” will be accessible (almost) forever.. what do you think?

We will collect all your feedbacks and decide what to do! Leave your comment below and tell us what you think about to use a Facebook Group as the new U64 Forum :) 

U64 back online, state of the site and suggestions!

As you can see, after months of problems and downtime, Unseen 64 is finally back online, with a new (lighter / faster / responsive) template and a lot of changes, even if some of these are not visible to most of you. The old database was too big and heavy, we had to clear it, to remove the forum (that almost no-one used anyway), to remove hundreds and hundreds of users accounts (if you wrote an article with your old account and now your name vanished, let us know so we can add you back as the authro!), uninstall many heavy (and not-so-useful) plugins, to add a new security system (so don’t try to log in the current site with your old U64 account, as you could get banned if the username does not exist anymore) and many (?) more.

What is still missing and what we would like to do:

  • Find a new form to add user-created articles (the old “wiki-alike” system was too complex and heavy for the server, almost no-one used it but spammers, so it was a long work for us to clean spam and bad, really bad-written articles)

  • Find a decent Advertising network to add a few banners to be able to pay the server cost for 2015 (for this year we are ok, but for the next year our current and optimized provider asks about 280$ a year, this site needs a lot of resources). If you have any suggestions, please leave a message below! We had Google Adsense in the past, but they banned us because we often talk about leaked prototypes and rom-hacks

  • Try to archive at least 1 new game (beta or cancelled) every month

  • Clean and improve current articles (as far as i can, i’m italian so probably my engrish will never be much better than this)

  • There are still HUNDREDS of emails and messages that we need to reply to, i don’t know when i’ll have the time to reply, but i’ll try to do it :P

Unseen 64 will still be limited to beta and cancelled games up to the seventh generation of video game consoles (AKA Xbox 360, Wii and PS3) for the complex reasons that you can read in this post. I already have some GBs of screens / videos / info about beta / unreleased games (from before the current gen of consoles) that are still not in the U64 archive (or elsewhere?), so there will be a lot of work to do and many years of potential updates.

Any suggestion, comment, compliment or insult are always welcome ;P At the moment comments are moderated, you need 1 approved comment before the next comments will be published automatically (again, even with spam-filters we had too many spam-comments on the site). 

Welcome to Unseen64 v4.0! :D

Welcome to Unseen64 v4.0! :D

Finally! Finally, finally finally finally! XD Finally after a year or 4 (I think?) I found the time and will to upgrade the site LOL! There is still a lot that has to happen but I have everything ready so it can be used! :D Most of the things I still need to do are especially background stuffs though so yeah you won’t be seeing much of those :3

As you can see the layout is updated to fit today’s techs :D The new and fresh layout is also ‘responsive’ meaning you can view the site on any device! The site will adapt itself to the device you are viewing it on. Ranging from phones, 3ds, vitas, tablets, tv’s and what not! You should try it yourself, it’s a llot of fun! :D

We also have a new Forum now! Finally we can discus our favorite unseen and released/upcoming games again! :D Also the “Off [Beta] Topic and Spam” section is back for some fun :) The forum works as it should completely but me and mono still have to add some stickies to it. Expect them to come soon! There are just two things you need to know, and that is that there is no possibility to PM stuff and you cannot preview posts but you can still edit them though. This due to some technical limitations.

Your profile is also different now. Instead of having to go to a special login page you can now directly login on the main site! Next to the traditional way of registering for U64 you can now also login with your favorite social network! Just click one of the icons under the login form to login with one of those and BAM! you can comment and participate in the forum! :D If you are logged in you can click on your name in the YOUR ACCOUNT block to edit your profile and upload your custom avatar and edit your signature and all. You also only need one account from now on for everything! No more different accounts for the site and forums and etc.

A last thing is that we also want to interact more on social networks! As you can see there are buttons to share posts and articles you like instantly on you Facebook, Twitter or G+. If you follow us on either Facebook or Twitter we will also auto-post an announcement with a link of every new article from now on so you will always be updated!

That’s it for now. If you have something to say about the new Unseen64, please leave your message in the comment box below (which also supports threaded comments from now on LOL)! I hope you will enjoy the new Unseen64 V4! :D