There’s some dark news for the original SWGEmu project this week – this’d be the Star Wars Galaxies emu that spawned most of the others and has been worked on for more than a decade. One of the project’s original founders told forumgoers that a severe accounting error had resulted in a large debt for the project; apparently, no one realized that the Hungarian non-profit emulator company would be subject to VAT taxes on its transactions with its US-based hosting company. The tl;dr is that the Emu now owes an additional $10,000 in EU back taxes.
The interesting bit is that he’s not actually asking for money, chiefly because a previous funding round and contributions from staff will be paying down the debt; he’s mostly providing transparency: “We’re not asking the community for more help, we will use $5,000 USD of the funds we already have, and handful of the staff and myself will pitch in to help me cover the remaining $5,068 USD. This will leave about one month of operating cash in the company and if donations stay at our current goal we should be able to continue the project barring unforeseen circumstances.”
It’s an interesting peek inside the struggles of not-really-fully-legal games like this, as well as into how much money is actually involved in keeping them afloat.
Coincidentally, MOP’s MJ Guthrie just streamed this original version of the emu this past weekend in commemoration of the “deathiversary” of SWG.
