ROMchip 2024 Financial Report

Hello and welcome to the very first ROMchip financial report!

At ROMchip, we like our practices to extend from our politics. You probably already know that accessibility and transparency is a big deal for us: we don’t have any kind of paywall or advertising, we don’t charge authors to publish with us, and authors keep the copyright on their work. But now that we are taking funds for our fans and readers, we also want to be a transparent Journal.

Hence this post, which is going to explain exactly where that money goes. Because when you donate to us, we want you to know that we put that money to good use. We also hope this level of transparency will be informative for other folks out there running, or considering running, various editorial projects. Please note -- some of this is money actually spent, some of it is earmarked for specific spending (and therefore still in our account); regardless, it all amounts how the 2024 funds are being used.
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So let’s get to it.

The Big Picture

In 2024, ROMchip raised $10,073.97 in donations; of that, all but $30 was subject to a 7% cut from our fiscal sponsor, Hack Club (that remaining $30 was a rollover from our prior fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas). Thus, we had $9,370.90 to put toward our expenses in 2024.

Here’s how those expenses broke down, which is also visualized in the chart below:

Copyediting: $2,438.70
Writer/Translator Commissions: $2,075
Fundraising: Tech Support: $660.00
ROMchip Presents Tech Costs: $420
Fundraising: Donor Swag: $298.13
ROMchip LLC Setup Costs: $2,027.84
Website Upgrade Fund: $750
Business Services: $451.17
Discretionary Fund: $250.06

People Power

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of each of these categories, I want to highlight one quick fact that we’re extremely proud of: nearly 60% of our budget went to paying *people*. Costs related to copyediting, writer and translator commissions, our fundraising tech support, and the “ROMchip Presents” Tech costs are all direct payments to individuals. We’re extremely proud that so much of our fundraising dollars are going directly into the pockets of hard-working creatives and freelance tech specialists.

Expense Breakdown

We’ve done my best, below, to explain each expense category, what determines it, and whatever context we think is necessary to help understand what it’s for. Some of this gets very specific, so feel free to go as deep or as surface as your inner fiscal nerd desires.

Copyediting
Copyediting is our single largest expense (26% of our budget), and with good reason: our copy editor is the reason everything is so readable and well organized! 😊 Her name is Mary, and she’s great to work with.

All copy at ROMchip goes through two passes of copyediting, which includes review by the authors and a member of the editorial group. We are invoiced on an hourly rate for each issue.

Writer/Translator Commissions
One of our fundraising commitments last year was that if we could raise an additional $2000, we would commission a new translation and a new materials piece at $1000 a pop. We held an open call for the Materials piece commission, and were lucky enough that one of those submissions had a translation angle to it (so we were able to kill two birds with one stone).

Both pieces are in process. The Materials commission went to Henrique Sampiao (producer of the Brazilian game history podcast Primeiro Contato), for a piece about the 1990s Brazilian game Casseta & Planeta: Noite Animal. Our translation commission went to Heidi Kemps and Brian Clark, who are producing an edited translation of Hiromasa Iwasaki’s doujinshi LEGEND #7: Why do 2D Games Usually Go to the Right?. We expect both will be published in the July 2025 issue.

Fundraising: Tech Support
These costs reflect a percentage-based commission earned by Cody, our tech producer, and Conway, our talent coordinator, based on the money raised during our live 12-hour fundraiser. Cody and Conway brought tremendous technical expertise, managed channel feeds, did live A/V adjustment, designed animated graphics, and did test runs and troubleshooting with all talent prior to the fundraiser stream. The percentage rate reflects a heavy discount for their services, which they offer as their own way to support ROMchip’s mission (thank you Cody and Conway 😭💐😭!!)

ROMchip Presents Tech Costs
This is a flat fee paid to Cody and Conway to handle the labor associated with hosting five free game history research talks on ROMchip’s Twitch channel. Three happen as part of our ramp-up to the single day fundraiser, and two others were spread out across the year. These talks are a way for us to showcase game history research with a broad public audience. Recordings of most talks are available on our YouTube channel.

Fundraising: Donor Swag
These costs were associated with producing and shipping promised gifts for our early donors, as well as some special awards for a few very generous individual donations. This included the gifts themselves (laptop stickers and little 3D printed plaques), as well as cards, envelopes, and shipping to about two dozen donors.

ROMchip LLC Setup Costs
This is a unique, one-time only line item that reimbursed money spent in 2023 to file ROMchip as an LLC in New York state. This was undertaken as part of the journal’s transition from being university-supported to being reader-supported through a fiscal sponsor. This provides some liability separation between the journal itself and the member of the editorial board that holds ownership of the LLC (Laine), keeps their taxes a little cleaner, and gives the ROMchip journal some actual economic and legally verified existence.

I (Laine) paid for these expenses out of pocket. Since I had no prior experience doing this, I’m sure I wasn’t quite as cost-effective as I could’ve been, but nearly half of this cost is attributed to the significant (and legally-required) expense of running a print business notice in 2 NYC newspapers. Most of the remaining cost was attributed to LegalZoom, our first one-year subscription to a virtual business address, and a notary fee.

In the future, this line item will be used to pay for our publishing platform hosting and support provider, openjournalsystems.com (not to be confused with Open Journal Systems, which is the platform itself! More on that below). Since those costs for our publishing platform host were billed before last year’s fundraiser (i.e. we were technically broke), they were generously comped to an Editorial Group member’s research funds as a one-time lift, rather than being paid by the journal.

Website Upgrade Fund
This is money we set aside out of the fundraiser to pay for an eventual website upgrade. In future reports, you’ll probably learn more about Open Journal Systems [OJS], which is basically the academic industry standard for running an online peer-reviewed journal (or as they describe it on their website, “the most widely used researcher-to-reader software to run scholarly journals and publish research articles”).

But here's the thing: the out-of-the-box OJS installation is, to put it bluntly, pretty ugly. Under-designed and confusing to navigate. Since we wanted our website to be a little more stylish, we hired a web developer to do some custom front-end coding, to give it more of an online “magazine” feel (we are apparently one of the only journals, out of hundreds of publications running on OJS, that uses a custom front-end design). Because the OJS programming backend is complicated, we have to hire outside help anytime we want to do a website refresh.

Additionally, we never quite figured out a good way to do publication layout; we transitioned web developers about two-thirds of the way through the project, and got left with a system that frankly has a lot of duct tape on it. Our current process for preparing copy for online publication is labor-intensive and tedious. And the journal site has limitations we want to improve -- for example, we currently can’t host video or do block quotes.

These are solvable problems, but we have to pay someone to solve them for us. This fund is basically a line item for storing that money, year-over-year, until we feel we have enough to make getting a quote worthwhile (we're looking to save up several thousand dollars for trying to improve the website).

Business Services
Business services include the cost of a registered agent, our virtual office business address, and our domain name. These costs should hopefully come down significantly next year, as I’ve found a much cheaper local option for registered agents than LegalZoom.

Discretionary Fund
The discretionary fund reflects money not currently earmarked for other expenses. We can use this money to cover unexpected costs (bills, filings, charges we didn’t see coming or expenses that were more than we thought they’d be). We could also use that money to host more Twitch talks or offset travel costs for an Editorial Group member to go to a conference and solicit copy. It might become the basis for a future scholarship or grant fund that helps pay grad students to travel to archives. Who knows! We just think it’s good to have a little extra cash on hand for a rainy day 😊
 
Thus concludes our first ever financial report! We hope you found it insightful. Feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

Game On,
​Laine, Dave, Henry, Soraya and Logan​