Happy New Year, gamers! We’re excited to write our first blog of 2023 with some exciting news. Let’s dive in.
In the final quarter of 2022, we received an unexpected (read: extraordinary) amount of financial support from donors far and wide! Throughout October alone, Gamers Outreach received more than $1.4 million in contributions. From a relative perspective, that’s nearly the amount of revenue we generated in our 2019 fiscal year.
A funding boost like this enables us to dedicate time and resources to major projects we’ve wanted to tackle for a long time. One of those projects relates to our most active program, GO Karts.
Our team is thrilled to announce we’ve decided to invest in a new manufacturing process to adequately scale the production of GO Karts and meet the requests we’ve received from hospitals both in the U.S. and abroad. This new process will empower us to build quantities of GO Karts in the thousands rather than hundreds and better service underrepresented hospitals.
With that, we’d like to introduce you to the latest generation of our portable video game kiosks – GO Kart 3.0.
This new manufacturing process was made possible in part thanks to our friends at NZXT. Since last year, their team has graciously helped us reimagine our GO Karts for the newest generation of consoles. With added support from recent donations, we can move forward on bringing these new units into existence.
The first batch of new GO Karts will represent nearly as many units as we’ve built in the entire history of our organization. Our goal is to have our active GO Kart fleet reach 2,000 units by early 2024.
We intend for these new units to be available for domestic and international deployment. Thanks to improved packaging, we’ll be able to provide our services more efficiently to hospitals beyond North America. The new GO Karts will also easily accommodate modern consoles – such as the Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 5.
We expect these new units will be ready for deployment between Summer – Fall of 2023.
Between now and then, we’re pooling donor support to help pre-order the newest batch. Any hospital purchase, donor request, or community fundraiser will go towards claiming one of our newest units. Our team will work to coordinate delivery logistics over the coming months so that, once built, the new GO Karts will be ready for deployment the moment they’re finished.
Despite inflationary trends, we’re proud to share that the new manufacturing process will empower us to maintain the existing GO Kart funding commitment of $3,500 per unit. Adjusting our manufacturing process ensures we can maintain an accessible pricing structure for hospitals without passing costs on to their constituents or our donors. This funding commitment will include the cost of the karts, as well as consoles and games equipped to each unit. This cost will also cover shipping within North America, as well as ongoing support from our team members at Gamers Outreach in the event hospitals need assistance. GO Karts requested for overseas deployment may incur additional shipping costs.
This is a tremendously exciting transition for us at Gamers Outreach. We anticipate broadening our global outreach – empowering more kids & families than we ever would’ve imagined possible when we started with our first GO Kart more than 15 years ago.
We look forward to sharing more details during our Gamers for Giving broadcast on March 25th & 26th of 2023.
Thank you all for your ongoing support and belief in the power of play to help kids heal!
Interested in donating one of our newest GO Kart units? Click here to learn more!