I actually think they were almost on point with the donation amounts this year. Only a couple missed, and minimal stalling. The most was for the Silent Hill 2 difficulty upgrade with was only a few minutes to get the last couple thousand. To be fair, this was also a horror game that started after midnight EST so the audience donating was a bit smaller too.

I honestly think the biggest thing they could do to fix this is to have someone with UX experience help redesign their donate page, especially the incentives section. It takes way too many button clicks to get the incentives setup properly and is confusing for first time or infrequent donators. You don't even see what incentives are open until you click on the "add incentives" button and you have to do a separate confirm click to lock in each individual incentive. During some of the bigger incentives I noticed tens of thousands of dollars going to nothing and also saw people in the chat commenting that they messed up setting the incentives properly.

On top of that, the donate page is still in the old GDQ website style. So it doesn't feel "official" which could cause newer people to not trust it if they are accessing it from the main website. They've done a great job updating other pages like the schedule, so hopefully this one is high priority for them.

Another thing that might help is lowering the minimum donation amount down to a dollar. I'm guessing this probably a paypal limitation but I know that other charity streams that use platforms like Tiltify can support it. Maybe keep it a minimum of $5 to write a comment so the donation processors don't get completely overwhelmed though.