Long time DUer Akoto is asking for a little help
Dear friends on the DU,
It has been a long time since I have raised funds for a fellow DUer. Akoto is a long time DUer on SSI looking for a little help. Rather than just asking for money, he is asking for two things. The first won't cost you a cent. Just subscribe to his YouTube page here: Legacy Ark Games - https://www.youtube.com/c/legacyarkgames . Secondly a cash donation will help him buy some equipment to help provide some small income for him. Marta and I are in on this. I hope you will be too. A K&R for this post will help with visibility. Also see this post where he goes into greater detail about his hopes and dreams: https://www.democraticunderground.com/10181675517
Donate by PayPal here: PayPal: rpgsruscs (at) gmail.com
I have a gaming-related company interested in discussing a fixed rate contract with me if I can go from 11k to 20k subscribed. With the help of investors, I think I can, but I really have nowhere to ask other than this community I've been a part of for 17 years. I'm a star member, longtime juror, and group moderator. Not a fly by night operation. I can easily manage this from my chair if I get the equipment and funding I need to meet these initial growth goals.
I know making a living from a YouTube channel about games sounds silly, but a lot of people do make a living from it these days, and I can easily manage it from my chair if I get the equipment and funding I need to meet these initial growth goals. That is the essence of my fundraising goal…a way to support myself and help others.
It’s difficult to ask for help, but at the same time, it supports both my good cause and the security of my personal future. The long and short of it is that I am physically disabled and housebound. My parents have both been very ill in the past years, with my dad having been found to have stage 4 cancer, even. It has scared me into the realization that, if I stay pinned under the rules of my disability insurance, I'll be living on the street eventually. For a long time now, I've been wanting to turn a very important hobby of mine into a living as others have done, one which would give me security while still enabling me to help the people I try to help.
My YouTube (and Twitch) channel, Legacy Ark Games, brings viewers along as I try out games contributed to me mostly by kind developers and producers who would like to support my cause. This entertains whoever may wander along, but I hope that it also educates disabled gamers like myself as to which games might interest them and whether the gameplay is accessible for their disability. I know that just watching these videos before I had the channel kind of helped me sanity during really bad pain, which is what inspired me to create it as a worthwhile escape. Now, as I have improved my skills and invested a bit in it, Legacy Ark Games has become a channel which works frequently with developers both to show their games off and to refine them with accessibility options when requested.
So, the goal is to raise the money I need for a piece of equipment to facilitate the growth of the channel, as well as sufficient funding to bring in new followers to the tune of 9k people.
Me again. I hope you help with this worthwhile project.
Omaha Steve A.K.A. OS
X post in Gaming & GD.
= new reply since forum marked as read
He's an industrious fellow, Omaha Steve. 
I'd like to thank everyone here for whatever contribution you can give. I can't lie, turning this immediately into a living means reaching that second goalpost, which is a $700 leap. That's unlikely short of some miraculous souls out there appearing. Still, as I try to figure out how to cover the remainder of the gap, any help you can give is deeply appreciated.
The non-financial support of a subscription to my channel is also just as appreciated! Or both, whatever works for you. Subscribing is free, and you won't get emails/messages or anything unless you click to be alerted about new Legacy Ark Games videos or streams starting up. If I make it to 20k subscribers, I have that fixed rate sponsorship contract awaiting me. That's another thing the financial goal will help with, should I by some chance reach it, but your subscription helps bit by bit to save funds for other channel improvements.
Help from this group, and subscriptions as well, is particularly appreciated from me because I partly created my channel to support disabled gamers like myself in particular. The other part of the reason was giving myself an excuse to get up and doing something, which later turned into the good cause as I found some talent with it, refined it, and worked with many game studios to showcase content with various levels of accessibility. Even as I commercialize/monetize the channel to become my living, ideally replacing disability's restrictions by committing to content on a daily basis, I remain committed to always having at least one accessibility-friendly game on the lineup.
All of that being said, as a fellow disabled guy, I know how limited finances can be and I absolutely urge you to contribute only if you really can. I don't want anyone to go without in order to help me get the gear and support to kick my channel forward. That would be self-defeating to me, given what my channel stands for!
Thanks again for anything you do. Even if it's a subscription to the channel, every subscriber gained is one less I have to struggle for to hit that 20k goal. Much obliged, all!