Minecraft gamers raise funds for Save the Children
Howard Lake | 4 November 2013 | News
Video gamer Athene is using popular online game Minecraft to raise funds for Save the Children through his Gaming for Good initiative. The campaign aims to raise more than $6 million for the charity.
Minecraft players take part by entering via the Gaming for Good website to play the game. In the standard Mincraft they can return to live easily after they ‘die’ in the game. On Gaming for Good, they have to donate money to charity each time they wish to continue playing.
The website was attracting so many players that Athene, whose real name is Bachir Boumaaza, had to find a more robust hosting system. Dedicated server company RapidSwitch, part of UK cloud company iomart Group plc, stepped in to provide the necessary support. It deployed over 20 new servers with 15 of them load balanced to spread traffic across the servers while still directing it all to the single IP address being used.
Neil Christie, Commercial Director for RapidSwitch, said: “It’s rare to have a platform being load balanced that is effectively not for profit so we were delighted to help. We made sure the platform was as stable as possible and that it could handle a lot of traffic.”
Athene hopes that gamers playing Minecraft through Gaming For Good will help take the total raised for Save The Children to $10,000,000.
Gaming for Good passes 100% of all donations to Save the Children. The platform lets games play games for charity, with games donated by games developers and publishers.
Photo: Minecraft creepers by Smultron Samhâllet on Flickr.com
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.