City of Heroes players filled Homecoming’s latest $8.6K monthly donation round in three hours

When NCsoft granted Homecoming LLC a license to operate City of Heroes at the top of January, one of the questions a lot of newcomers to the situation had focused on was how the servers are paid for, as NCsoft is not picking up the tab. In fact, existing players have been paying City of Heroes’ rent for almost the last four years, as Homecoming has been running a donation campaign at the end of every month with detailed expense reporting. Traditionally, those campaigns make their targets within hours, and then they’re closed so that the team isn’t generating a massive surplus.

That’s how the team plans to continue, under the terms of NCsoft’s contract. On Saturday, Homecoming opened its first donation round since announcing the acquisition of the license, with a donation target of $8,636.68. That’s up quite a bit since February 2023, which was $4,813.57, but in the breakdown it’s clear that legal fees (presumably owing to the NCsoft license) and infrastructure upgrades (presumably to handle the spiking playerbase) are responsible. Even so, the target was met in around three hours.

“We have had some additional expenses related to restructuring around the City Council, updating our legal documentation, and the SQL host hardware upgrades which were not in the goal for the January donation window,” the group says. “Some of these have been paid already out of the contingency fund, and some will be paid in February. In both cases, these additional expenses will be included in the February donation window and not in the breakdown for January.”

We’ve previously asked the team what would happen should donations ever come up short, but Homecoming reps shrugged off the idea. “We don’t expect this to ever be an issue,” they told me. “When our donations are opened up on schedule, they generally fill within a few hours. Even if we post them at an odd time, it still fills in a matter of days. We also maintain a contingency fund (as described in our FAQ) to help cover any short-term issues, and we are able to easily scale our hardware and costs to meet demand (and this won’t result in any shards merging – they all share hardware) if that’s ever necessary.”

Given that we’re nearly four years in to this business model and it’s shown no signs of wear even when temporarily doubled, we’re guessing it’ll be a long time before anybody needs to worry about that – and in the meantime, it’s presenting the MMO industry with an intriguing level of transparency and data on the costs associated with running a rogue server that’s no longer rogue.