Slashdot Mirror
Video Games Charity Raises Over $10 Million
jones_supa writes "Gaming for Good, a charity established and fronted by celebrity gamer Bachir 'Athene' Boumaaza, has this week passed the significant milestone. At time of writing the group's tally stands at a tame $10 million. It works like this: game publishers donate games to the charity, without asking for profit. Regular folks buy points, which can then be exchanged to games on the website. Finally the money used to buy the points goes to charity. So in one way they're really just buying games, but instead of the money going to publishers, it's going to a good cause. Money raised is going to the international charity Save The Children, where it can be used on health programs in Malawi, Indonesia and Bangladesh."
You don't trust him because you don't know anything about him. Let me be the first to inform you that it's pretty easy to look someone up on the internet these days. I'm going to assume you just stopped reading when you saw he had an arab name and concluded he must be scamming people.
He raised over a million last year, he went to Africa to film what they did with the money, his charity is approved by USAID (which means it gets checked by the government). He works for Razer, he campaigns for Net Neutrality, he makes money based on his popularity,.... He's not some shady guy who tries to scam people because that would destroy his career, income and get him sued by quite a lot of people.
I don't really care that someone prefers Childs Play (who also do great work) but spouting bullshit about another charity is just pathetic.
Here is financial info for Save the Children if anyone is interested. 2012 operating revenue was $597mil.
Congratulations to everyone involved. The few Athene videos I saw when he started were lowest common denominator attempts at shock value, but I'm glad something good is coming out of it.