Elaztek Studios Acquisition
Today is an exciting day for Donation Store - and its new owner, Elaztek Studios.
As many of you may have heard - particularly those of you on the Discord server, development of Donation Store was stopped - as Mark was simply becoming too preoccupied with other obligations, and was unable to continue development. However, he did also announce that he was open to selling the platform - which is where we come in.
Who are you? What's an Elaztek Studios?
I am haloman30 - the Founder and Owner of Elaztek Studios. And now, by extension, the owner of Donation Store. I started using the software back in 2020, and never looked back. Like many of you, I was pretty bummed when development was stopped. At first, I intended to wait and see if someone else purchased the product, or if something else would happen. A bit later on, however, I and friend of mine - Michael - started talking a bit and we ended up deciding to reach out to Mark and see where things led.
As you've probably worked out by now, things went quite well! After a good bit of back and forth, we all collectively agreed upon a set of terms and a price. Today, at long last, we begin our journey to carry Donation Store's torch forward.
As for what Elaztek Studios is, it's a video game and software development studio that I founded in 2017, and is the new owner of all of Donation Store assets.
However, I'm not gonna be working alone. I've got a friend of mine, Michael, who has been a great help for my own Minecraft server/community over the years, as well as a key part of the Elaztek Studios team, who will be working with me as well. He and his own company, Errite Softworks, will be primarily dealing with the real nitty-gritty of Donation Store's development. My role will be more in the design and user experience area, as well as of course providing my own input for where we take things from here.
So, what exactly do you have planned?
Currently, we are exploring several possible options with the goal of reintroducing the cloud offering (Don't worry - self-hosted isn't going anywhere, and under our watch, never will). Additionally, we are going to be finally disabling the IP address restriction that is currently still in place for self-hosted licenses. In the future, we'll likely be reintroducing this check, but when we do, you'll be able to edit it directly within the control panel - rather than having to deal with tickets. Once this is done within the next week or so, you can expect a follow-up announcement from us - so if you've been waiting to reinstall Donation Store somewhere else, you should finally be able to very soon.
Beyond that, we are of course going to be working on continuing development of future Donation Store versions. We cannot yet commit to a timeframe on this, as it will take some time for us to become familiar enough with the codebase to be able to effectively maintain it going forward.
The last thing we'll comment on is open-source: currently, we do not have any immediate plans for an open-source release. That being said, we do have a number of ideas to expand upon what end users can do with the platform - though we can't talk about any of those today.
For now, though, that's all we've got. You can expect to see both myself and Michael around a fair bit more going forward, and we'd be happy to answer any questions you may have via our Discord server. Our primary goal with this announcement was to let you folks know who we are, and to let you know that DonationStore's life is still far from over.
- haloman30
Join the Discord Check out Elaztek Studios
Mark Barrett
First comment! :P
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Stefano Haagmans
Second comment :O
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