What's the recommended budget for an HCF server?

[Riks]

Hey, I'm back in the Minecraft community since a few weeks now and I was wondering, what is the recommended budget to launch an HCF server? Including everything, but I'm mainly interested about how much should be spent in ads. If you have any idea, comment below with a few details!

 

[JustGaminq]

Hey, I'm back in the Minecraft community since a few weeks now and I was wondering, what is the recommend budget to launch an HCF server? Including everything, but I'm mainly interested about how much should be spent in ads. If you have any idea, comment below with a few details!

I am happy to see people interested in starting up communities in Minecraft nowadays so it is amazing you want to give it a shot. I have personally been in the HCF community for many many years at this stage and I have seen a massive decline in popularity from its peak.

Many people in this community nowadays will say something along the lines of HCF is dead and it isn't worth your time. This really isn't the case and it is just people being negative about recent statistics. Anyone game mode can completely die to 0 people and then be revived if the new community justifies it.

To create a popular and successful HCF server nowadays, Although it isn't impossible, You will find it a hard task to achieve. To succeed in this category at this point in time, You will need to have a high-quality server (Development and Builds) and heavy advertising. If you are a developer or a builder then that can reduce your costs if you are confident in your abilities however to advertise your server enough to make a profit and high player counts you will need a heavy budget for advertising. Many popular HCF content creators are either under contract with one of the most popular servers at this time or they are highly committed to an established community.

So not only will you need a heavy budget for advertising but you will need to have contact otherwise you may struggle to get advertising at all from people already involved within the HCF community.

So to get to my point, I would avoid this being the first game mode you start off with from coming back unless you have skills and plenty of resources and time.

Additional Message: I just realised I forgot to say a figure which is the whole reason you were creating this thread. I personally would estimate you will need 4-5 figures to become successful in this community at the moment! Of course, If you want to go for an abnormal method of advertising for the category or you know a lot of media then you can reduce it to maybe 3 figures.

 

[Riks]

I am happy to see people interested in starting up communities in Minecraft nowadays so it is amazing you want to give it a shot. I have personally been in the HCF community for many many years at this stage and I have seen a massive decline in popularity from its peak.

Many people in this community nowadays will say something along the lines of HCF is dead and it isn't worth your time. This really isn't the case and it is just people being negative about recent statistics. Anyone game mode can completely die to 0 people and then be revived if the new community justifies it.

To create a popular and successful HCF server nowadays, Although it isn't impossible, You will find it a hard task to achieve. To succeed in this category at this point in time, You will need to have a high-quality server (Development and Builds) and heavy advertising. If you are a developer or a builder then that can reduce your costs if you are confident in your abilities however to advertise your server enough to make a profit and high player counts you will need a heavy budget for advertising. Many popular HCF content creators are either under contract with one of the most popular servers at this time or they are highly committed to an established community.

So not only will you need a heavy budget for advertising but you will need to have contact otherwise you may struggle to get advertising at all from people already involved within the HCF community.

So to get to my point, I would avoid this being the first game mode you start off with from coming back unless you have skills and plenty of resources and time.

Additional Message: I just realised I forgot to say a figure which is the whole reason you were creating this thread. I personally would estimate you will need 4-5 figures to become successful in this community at the moment! Of course, If you want to go for an abnormal method of advertising for the category or you know a lot of media then you can reduce it to maybe 3 figures.

What you've explained is pretty interesting, but what do you mean by heavy budget for advertising? Do you have a range you could give me?

 

[Foxzes]

It's entirely dependent on what kind of success you're hoping to achieve. If you want a humbly successful HCF, with a couple dozen players concurrently, you shouldn't need much more than an organically grown community. You can do this through Reddit, server listing sites, and with a couple hundred bucks on some less aggressive advertising.

If you're new to the scene, I'd recommend giving that a shot first. It'll allow you to find your footing, learn the environment, and figure out what you want in return. If you're a few months in, enjoying yourself, and finding a pretty modest success, that's the point where I'd sit down and think just how seriously you want to take this.

As JustGaminq said, to properly compete and become a leader in the HCF community you'd need a minimum of 4 figures to throw around. Done properly, this could easily net you thousands of players and this would then expand itself organically a lot more substantially, through being highly ranked on listing sites, and through word of mouth.

Another aspect of budget is hosting. Presuming you don't want to invest thousands to build your own machine, a host can still run you hundreds a month if you're trying to be huge. This is wasted money though if you start too soon, so following my earlier advice I'd start smaller and work your way up. Buying a top-of-the-line machine and running it for a community of 10 players is poor money management.

If you are however just hoping to throw a ton of money to climb to the top first, I'd hire people who know what they're doing. Find someone experienced in HCF and someone who knows their way around plugins, find an advertising expert and throw some cash at content creators for exposure once you're done.

Luckily, most HCF servers run off of pre-made and publicly accessible plugins, which is great for budget. Plugin developers are pricey and rightfully so, something custom would run you thousands easily. In terms of setup costs, HCF might be one of the better options on the market.

TL;DR Figure out how serious you are, what scale you envision your community being on, and figure out how much you're willing to spend to make that happen.

 

[JustGaminq]

What you've explained is pretty interesting, but what do you mean by heavy budget for advertising? Do you have a range you could give me?

Heavy Advertising in my mind means between 4 and 5 figures. Another way of putting it is, You will ideally need thousands for advertising over a set period of time.

Post automatically merged: Jun 20, 2022

It's entirely dependent on what kind of success you're hoping to achieve. If you want a humbly successful HCF, with a couple dozen players concurrently, you shouldn't need much more than an organically grown community. You can do this through Reddit, server listing sites, and with a couple hundred bucks on some less aggressive advertising.

If you're new to the scene, I'd recommend giving that a shot first. It'll allow you to find your footing, learn the environment, and figure out what you want in return. If you're a few months in, enjoying yourself, and finding a pretty modest success, that's the point where I'd sit down and think just how seriously you want to take this.

As JustGaminq said, to properly compete and become a leader in the HCF community you'd need a minimum of 4 figures to throw around. Done properly, this could easily net you thousands of players and this would then expand itself organically a lot more substantially, through being highly ranked on listing sites, and through word of mouth.

Another aspect of budget is hosting. Presuming you don't want to invest thousands to build your own machine, a host can still run you hundreds a month if you're trying to be huge. This is wasted money though if you start too soon, so following my earlier advice I'd start smaller and work your way up. Buying a top-of-the-line machine and running it for a community of 10 players is poor money management.

If you are however just hoping to throw a ton of money to climb to the top first, I'd hire people who know what they're doing. Find someone experienced in HCF and someone who knows their way around plugins, find an advertising expert and throw some cash at content creators for exposure once you're done.

Luckily, most HCF servers run off of pre-made and publicly accessible plugins, which is great for budget. Plugin developers are pricey and rightfully so, something custom would run you thousands easily. In terms of setup costs, HCF might be one of the better options on the market.

TL;DR Figure out how serious you are, what scale you envision your community being on, and figure out how much you're willing to spend to make that happen.

I definitely agree with what Foxzes has said here. If you are looking to start small you can start up an HCF server for a lower budget however you will have highly limited success.

You can cut costs in many different ways but you can't go cheap on one thing and overspend on another. You need a constant quality throughout your community. Ideally, the best way to succeed with large player counts will be to get yourself a custom HCF core as well as some other custom/premium plugins and make something original. This doesn't have to be custom features but known features done with a tiny twist or a different quality of work. Although In the community, you can get a cheap public HCF core, I just don't see this being worth it. Source codes for many popular HCF courses throughout the game modes history are available online and you can just fork this to make something unique. This issue with this is it tends to be leaked source codes you would use which isn't really that ethical unless you pick wisely which Is what I recommend.

But if you are looking for something smaller that allows you to test the waters of the current HCF community then budget yourself. Get a public core, Do all the configs yourself and advertise with a limited budget on effective sources.

Anyways, I wish you the best of luck of this project!

 

[Riks]

Pretty interesting explanations here. For a bit of context, I've been in the Minecraft community for a bunch of years but I started working on my public Discord bot, which became a bit known (Invite Tracker) but now I'm again interested in opening a Minecraft server as you can see.

I pretty much have the budget, the developers and the builders so this seems fine. I'll try to find a few people to chat with about managing the advertisement and stuff.

Anyways, thank you for your posts, if you have more to tell me let me know below this post, I'll be happy to chat with you here or directly on Discord.

 

[Zalbus]

Pretty interesting explanations here. For a bit of context, I've been in the Minecraft community for a bunch of years but I started working on my public Discord bot, which became a bit known (Invite Tracker) but now I'm again interested in opening a Minecraft server as you can see.

I pretty much have the budget, the developers and the builders so this seems fine. I'll try to find a few people to chat with about managing the advertisement and stuff.

Anyways, thank you for your posts, if you have more to tell me let me know below this post, I'll be happy to chat with you here or directly on Discord.

Is HCF the route you want to go down in 2022? I'm not sure how active the HCF community is. May be wrong though Lol.

 

[Riks]

Is HCF the route you want to go down in 2022? I'm not sure how active the HCF community is. May be wrong though Lol.

I’ll try my best to create a nice server, and have a bunch of players playing on it. I really like this game mode, and so do other players.