Playing & Trading Strategy

Cantor Fitzgerald has been a willing and reliable steward of HSX for decades, enabling us to enjoy a great game at no charge, but has decided not to continue to shoulder (and fund) that responsibility.  Every HSXer should thank Cantor Fitzgerald.

While none of us know specifically, we can only speculate as to how much money has been spent on this site, which has allowed us to play this game as a community for free (for a quarter of a century).  With the layoff of Antibody now 4 weeks behind us, time is of the essence.

Hoping to preserve a future – perhaps even arrange a better future – for HSX, I have been working with some others to identify a way to keep HSX running while a group of volunteers seeks to arrange a long-term future for HSX.

We have developed relationships with people who have the specialized skills and experience enabling them to help us maintain HSX.  We are communicating with Cantor Fitzgerald leadership, proposing to arrange an interim solution that would keep HSX alive during efforts to secure a long-term solution.

Any successful user-driven effort to preserve HSX would need to begin to pay the monthly costs of HSX operation relatively soon.  Operating costs – for server and infrastructure, content management, and technical support – appear to approximate $2,200 each month. 

These costs include:

• AWS server/infrastructure costs

• Content management to update the site (Antibody)

• Some technical/operational costs for someone to keep the site running

We can’t go into all the details yet, as proposals to Cantor are still in the works, but between donations  raised, returning advertising revenue as traffic comes back, the part-time spent each month by Antibody and the technical/operations person who’s been managing things the past few years – we are hopeful that Cantor will allow the site to continue.

To show Cantor Fitzgerald, and prospective vendors who would operate the website, that there is a realistic prospect of saving HSX, we should try to generate approximately $25,000 to fund roughly one year of HSX operations.  If you enjoy HSX and want to keep the lights on, we need your help!

Here is how this goes from this point.  I have pasted a small survey below asking each of you for a future pledge. 

We need to dial in on what we as a community can comfortably commit to when it is time to raise the funds.  Though the first survey results were a great indicator, the details on donations were broad.  It shows as a community that 160 people were willing to donate a range from $15,000 to $54,000.  Now I know there are more than that willing to donate, but we’re doubtful we come in towards the high end of those figures.  As a community. we need to be close to the middle.

This is very simple, you can either commit to a pledge, or not.  The new survey is just very detailed fact finding.  At this point we are still not raising the funds, nor is your answer holding you to any commitment.  We will only ask for this info that once we have approval to proceed, we can count on your pledge.

Let me be clear, the funds we raise (if our proposal works) will stretch as far as we can get them.  Those raised funds will go to the expenses indicated above; there will still be plenty of volunteer time needed and provided to keep this game running. 

This one-time potential fund-raise is not the fix, but more importantly it allows us time to get the game back online and come up with a permanent solution.  

The alternative to that is we all just walk away and roll the dice that the site does not shut down and they start pumping money back into it, or someone buys it.  Good Night and Good Luck.

However, if we are successful in the fund-raise, we might spend the next year keeping the lights on, getting the game moving again, and find out that there are not any suitors or that our efforts were short-lived.  This is the chance/risk we need to be willing to take and are asking you (the community members) to get behind.

We understand that it is a tough time in the world financially for many now.  We need you to think about how important this game and community is to you.  How much of your digital identity/footprint is attached to this game?  If you are comfortable with it vanishing into thin air without a donation, then no problem.  For those of you that want to get behind our efforts to find a way, your best financial pledge is what we are asking.

To put my money where my mouth is, I will start and provide a financial pledge of $2,500 (10% of what we are looking for) with potential for more if needed and it makes sense to do so.

If this proposal is approved, we will choose an outlet (like GoFundme) to then raise these funds.  At that time, we will provide full transparency of who is behind the scenes on this and how the money will be managed.  In other words, when we raise these funds, there will be a Board of Directors overseeing the money and not controlled by one person.  These details will be made availble before any money is asked for or accepted.

I cannot stress enough that if this attempt fails, then we have given up as a collective community and thrown in the towel.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but my hope is there are enough of us out there that we can keep this going and buy us the time to not only make the game better but keep it up permanently.

Last Chance Saloon, Guys and Gals.  

This is a fluid situation, but we are pressed for time, so I am providing real-time information to give us the best chance to succeed.

Here is the survey:  https://forms.gle/kfT8XTLEVpsLXuvh8  I have not required a gmail login, which means the survey can be taken more than once.  I did that for convenience but ask that you politely not take this more than once.  

I will update the board if/when we reach our goal.  I plan to keep this post atop of the page as it rolls off, so please do not get annoyed as you see it posted over and over.

Stay safe and good luck to us all,
lobo