Feb 17 Discord Update
2025-06-16 14:43:44
Hi everyone,
An update regarding funding for the WCH.
We know that y'all want to book soon, and are waiting for more info/guarantees about funding.
The bad news is that hard guarantees are gonna take a while, for reasons we'll get into in a bit.
But what we can do is tell you our rough plan for how we intend to use our funds, once we have them, and what are plans for funding are/our timeline is.
First off, some of you are probably wondering why we didn't have crowdfunding set up, like, yesterday. We wanted to - but that crowdfunding needs to go through the association we are still in the process of founding. The statutes need to be written in German, and are a legal text, basically, a contract between the association and all of its members, as well as a declaration of what we are allowed to spend our money on. It's important to get right, I needed to do this basically alone (ofc with review from RmwCby), and am not a legal expert. Throw in that life threw me for a bit of a loop recently, and it took until very recently until we settled on our initial statutes.
The good news: I've officially handed our statutes and formal notice that we are founding an association to the Austrian government. Once they give us the go-ahead - or, more likely, don't complain about our statutes for 4 weeks* - we can officially do business, and that's when you can expect a lot happening very fast.
We expect to get money in the following ways:
- We will have membership fees that we'll probably set to 5€/month or 50€ per year. Membership won't be a requirement, it's mainly a way to support the WCH (and future events), as well as cover running costs (server, domain, bank account, etc). There will be some perks, but none that give a real advantage with funding or participating in tournaments.
- We will have a crowdfunding campaign that people can contribute to if they want to contribute a larger amount, or prefer a one-time contribution.
- We will talk to potential sponsors.
- If all else fails, we will finance what we must (and maybe more) with our own personal money.
This year, the plan is to pour almost all of our money into the WCH, mostly by recompensating people for their trips. The exceptions are running costs (as described above) and maybe some merch (that we hope to make a profit with at the WCH, allowing us to have even more money for it).
Unless we get a very large amount of money, we won't be able to refund everyone's travel costs. So, we need to decide who gets how much if funds are limited. We want to do this in a way that:
- Primarily helps people who need it the most
- Makes attending at least a bit more attractive for everyone
- Balances funding trips from all over the world and making where people live matter less with enabling as many people as possible to attend
- Balances these other goals with allowing top players to participate
First off, we'll prioritize refunding travel costs pretty hard. Our reasoning here is that we can provide cheap accommodations for those who really need them, and that it's up to people to decide if they want to be thrifty or splurge on a 5 star hotel. In other words, it's harder to define what's necessary or reasonable here, so we're focusing on travel costs, as they are going to be fairly fixed.
We'll pay out money in two waves. The first wave will be soon after the WCH, so that people can get their money back ASAP. The second wave will be paid out in December, giving people who missed the deadline more time to make claims, and allowing us to use as much of our membership fees for the year as possible. That means more money paid back, and also, if Austria doesn't deem us a charitable organization, less money we need to pay corporate tax on.
There will be an announcement in a few days with details/concrete numbers. Until then, happy sweeping!
RmwCby and ralokt