Oh, well, now that I think about it he did correct himself on Skype after he said pounds.

 

On a server that I was a member of for a long time, the "god" level was 1500 GBP. People could not believe it when the first player donated that amount. Yes, people did donate that much. No, it did not buy a modship. For the curious, the server made a lot of money. The owner did in fact share the accounting use of that money with key admins, but to the Public, he advertised it as being 100% used to the server benefit and no personal profit... which is partly why lots of adult players donated $200+. Ultimately there was a huge problem (he paid himself most of the money for the nonprofit benefit of the server!) and its basically "dead" now. He included his own salary as nonprofit benefit, so both sides had a point. It made about $38,000 per year. But not anymore.

 

$38,000? What could you do to improve a server with that much money?

 

Get better hardware, bigger data pipes, more plugins, etc. Then write/modify custom integration modules (this is about to be fundamentally changed with 1.4.x and later releases, however, with Mojang's new plugin standard). But even that won't come close to consuming anywhere near $30k... even in Europe

Note: some may not know GBP is "Great Britain Pounds" in my prior post. That's about $2200 to $2300 at the time, to get the "God" rank.

 

I still can't believe that someone would pay that much.

I don't think I'd ever do it unless the server was the best I've seen in my life.

I might do it if every structure I made was recreated in the real world though...

 

All were successful professionals irl, except for one young man who's daddy had a lot of GBP. Quite a few donated, one guy about 8 hours after the first did it. Until the first did, it was always a joke that no one would do that. It takes a lot of time (& money), in fact, to run a good server... esp. with large numbers, high speed, and low lag. Many people want a good server, but dont want to run one day by day. Those that donated that much just wanted to play in their free time and have no worries about anything. It costs less than a decent boat, anyway.

 

BTW, the bulk of the money came from the $50 to $400 donor range.

 

I'd rather have a boat.

If the server shut down like it did, you would lose $2000 dollars.

I doubt he refunded all of the donations.