April is Support OCR Month 2009

Last year, djpretzel mentioned in a write-up that “Sometimes, because of our content policy, our LLC status, the amount of content on the site, or any number of things, people mistakenly think that we're an actual business that has ample resources and makes money, etc. This is not the case - money from all our ads, shirt sales, and donations combined only barely breaks even these days due to the operational cost of hosting the site. In other words, we always need whatever help you can provide.”

The same holds true this year as well. Before I get right to it, however, I’d like to cover a few points. OverClocked ReMix has experienced some tremendous growth in the last year - I think it’s fair to say that none of the “old-timers” ever anticipated how popular it would become or the impact it would have on so many people on so many levels. With Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, we managed to make our way into a major video game franchise, we’ve gotten a lot of positive attention online and through events like Video Games Live, and we’re receiving an ever increasing number of submissions from both aspiring and renowned musicians from all over the world. Why does any of this matter? The larger the site grows, the more resources it takes to keep moving forward.

Many of you will remember that this time last year, I unofficially declared April to be “Support OCR Month”. It seemed appropriate, since the site was not only officially standing on its own two legs, but was growing rapidly, with the cost of things like bandwidth and hosting quickly outgrowing the limited funds generated from T-shirts, stickers, hoodies, and ads. Whether you've personally downloaded one or all of the remixes that are hosted here, enjoyed any of the album projects, made it to a meet-up or convention and had a blast, played a game online with friends you’ve made here, learned a skill you didn’t have before, improved a skill or ability, helped someone else in the same way, sit and spent minutes or hours and hours on the forums, or any combination of these things etc, that's all made possible by djp's continued work on the site and our ability to make such resources available. This year’s A1 gag was great, but it’s not entirely unrealistic—that is, the possibility of losing the battle to site operating costs and watching the site disappear. In fact, though we aren't quite in dire straights, we walk closer to that ledge than many people think.