Uncertainty has enfolded Star Wars Galaxies rogue server SWG Restoration III, as a player senator leaked financial plans from the team that suggest the developers are considering compensating subscribers with in-game items – and the leak has now been confirmed by server admins.
As posted to Reddit, a player senator leaked a proposed admin plan to add benefits to both a monthly $9.99 subscription and a $200+ “annual capital campaign” presumably aimed at bolstering the rogue server’s finances. Proposed benefits included unique cosmetics, rare retired items, titles, badges, Discord roles, character icons, developer access, special concept art, and recognition in-game on various monuments. It’s all fairly benign stuff, but it amounts to subscription perks for a rogue server, which have the potential to provoke Disney to intervene, something it has not bothered to do throughout the emulator projects’ long history – but that’s because most servers generally just take open donations with no rewards.
The leak might have been buried inside Discord and ignored as a fake on Reddit but for the fact that the game’s top admin addressed it on the official Discord, confirming both the leak’s contents and how the leak happened.
“We’re disappointed that a Senator leaked some ideas we were considering from one of our private channels,” Aconite wrote. “We regularly share ideas with the senate, all sorts, that never see the light of day.” He does not directly say that the sub benefits are not happening, only that they’re being considered and that they won’t be pay-to-win. He also claims that SWGR is the only server to be a “real non-profit,” which is apparently offered up as mitigating factor, and still later he reposted a pic of a comment stating that “only poor people are mad.”
To be clear, SWG Resto is not the only legal non-profit in the SWG emulator community; SWGemu is as well. The SWGR admin later said he’d dismissed SWGemu because SWGemu is a Core3 server rather than a source server. (For those unaware, there has been a long-running legitimacy-motivated gang war between the servers built to emulate the original pre-CU and the servers based on the NGE code leak. If this sounds like a dumb distinction to fight over – as well as one neither Disney nor the legal system would recognize should it ever come to that – welcome to SWG rogue servers.)
Players on Reddit have additional snips that suggest SWGR game owes several thousand dollars to its host and is it not currently receiving sufficient donations to cover that. To its credit, the team actually does maintain transparency on its budget, so you can verify that yourself; AWS server hosting fees appear to cost around $2800 a month, but the current reserve won’t pay for even one month at that rate.
Readers will recall that finances have been a problem for other SWG rogue servers in the past, including SWGemu’s Finalizer server, whose admin berated his players a year ago for not donating enough.
For what it’s worth, SWG Resto devs echo the words of many other SWG rogue servers in saying they’re not concerned about being shut down by Disney. We are talking about an emu community that has been running for significantly longer than the original game ran, after all.
Looky-loos should take note that full access to the server’s Discord is gated behind game account access, and we saw several references to angry folks being booted for not actually having characters on the game account they’ve linked, so heads up.
