What the money actually pays for
The shelves, and nothing that is not the shelves.
Collections turn up that need rescuing, usually from somebody who inherited one and has no idea what to do next. Games need cases, sleeves, cleaning and somewhere dry to live. Every item that arrives has to be photographed and written down properly or it may as well be in a box in a loft.
Some of it goes into a pot for the thing I actually want, which is somewhere you can walk into, pick up a controller older than the person handing it to you, and play. That is years away and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it gets closer every month, and members are the reason.
Once a year I will publish what came in and what it paid for. Plainly, with numbers.
Being honest about how early this is
There are not many members yet. There might be none when you read this.
So join because you want this to exist, not because there is a queue. The first hundred people get a number, and that number is yours permanently. In ten years, when hopefully there is somewhere to visit, member fourteen will still be member fourteen.
You can leave whenever you like, and nothing about it is designed to be difficult.
Does it pay for itself?
Work it out rather than taking my word for it, because the arithmetic is not complicated.
Delivery is charged at the rate shown at checkout. Order twice in a month and free delivery alone has covered most of the fee. Order three times and it has covered all of it before anything else is counted. Add the points back, the week’s head start on new stock, and a magazine that arrives on paper four times a year, and the sums stop being close.
If you buy from here once or twice a year, the free tier is the honest answer and it always will be. I would rather say that than sell you something you cancel in March.
What it is not
It is not a donation. Everything on the list above is worth more than it costs.
It is also not a loyalty card. I am not trying to get you to spend more. A lot of what you get, the catalogue, the hunt list, the gaps against a set, is free precisely because it should be.
What you are paying for is that this keeps going, and that it stays the kind of place where the flaws get photographed.
What is coming later
There will eventually be a third tier above Collector, for people who want to fund the permanent thing rather than just be part of it. It already has a name, Completionist, and that is about as far as it has got. It does not exist yet, there is no point pricing something I cannot deliver, and it is not on the table above. When it is real it will be here, and nothing about the two tiers that exist today will get worse to make room for it.
Questions people have asked
Can I pause it? Yes. Tell me and it stops. There is nothing to argue with.
What happens to my founding number if I leave and come back? You keep it. It was yours.
Do I have to buy anything? No. Plenty of members will never buy a disc, and the catalogue and the hunt list are the reason they are here.
Is the magazine any good? Ask me again when issue one exists. It is being written, and it will arrive when it is worth reading rather than when a calendar says so. What goes in it is here.