Niche Gamer Community Fundraising Update - April 2019

Hey guys – it’s Brandon here, the owner and EIC of Niche Gamer. It's been a bit since our last community / fan support update, but we have some awesome new stuff to recap and share with you all.

While we have been offering backer subscription rewards on Patreon like ad-free browsing, exclusive Discord titles and 24/7 exclusive chatting with our staff, we now offer the same backer-rewards over on Subscribestar.

The decision to launch a new but mirrored profile on Subscribestar came after many of our fans and former patrons (on Patreon) were unhappy with that company's decisions regarding more political Patreon accounts. We agreed more options for fan support should be available, so now we've launched a profile on Subscribestar as well!

As before, if you'd like to help us out and do a one time donation - we totally accept those as well. You can find more information about that over on our Donate page.

In the previous months, we have brought on our first real editor - Zoe, and she has been doing fabulously well. Zoe has been helping with me with the bulk of our reviews editing, as well as a large portion of our day to day article publishing. I've been looking for a good editor for a long time now to help me focus more on growth of the business and such, and we finally found her!

We also re-hired Tyler Valle again, you guys may remember him from a few years ago when he was really pushing our YouTube and video content. Tyler has been doing reviews for us consistently and post-E3 we are looking to have him gear up to really push our video content once more. We're happy to have him back working for us.

As we're bringing on more staff and I'm delegating work out more, our budget is even moreso dedicated to paying all of our staff for their work. We pay staff a flat fee per work, not a lame CPM based ratio (to discourage clickbait), so we now more than ever are hoping you guys can help support us directly by subscribing via Patreon, Subscribestar, or Paypal.

A random aside - we got a new new design for Mika, our mascot, which you can view above! We're hoping to introduce more designs of her in the future, but that really depends on our budget, directly from you all.

As always, our growth is on an incremental but healthy uptick mostly due to our rabid efforts to cover as much as we can, as often as we can, and our social media presence - which is exploding thanks to our resident social media memelord, CWB. Our community has never been stronger!

Even one dollar a month helps us immensely, if you throw us three dollars you get ad-free browsing, an exclusive Discord title, and exclusive Discord chat access to our staff 24/7. We're working on the logistics for more rewards, but are currently tight on time and staffing due to our budget (roughly $400 a month on Patreon right now). Again, anything helps - you guys are amazing!

Our goal for fan-funding is at least $1000 a month from Patreon and/or Subscribestar. Ideally, we'd be mirroring our income on Patreon over on Subscribestar, as we don't want to be locked into fearing partisan politics having our profile affected. We are, as always, neutral and slanted towards you - the consumer. That is our only goal, to be a conduit between gamedev and consumer.

As for what to expect in the very near future - we have some exciting meetings planned for this year's E3 that will blow your mind, as well as many more reviews, previews, interviews, livestreams, original video content (tutorials, etc), and new features! Post-E3, we're looking to finally launch our anime/asian culture site, and add more features to our core like a game database (which links to all articles, has a sample of screenshots and basic info), user reviews (which are linked on each game's page), blogs, and more!

Let us know what you guys would like to see us offer in backer rewards in the comments below! We're exploring options for unique Mika wallpapers/calendars, backer-chosen games for us to stream every month, and more.

So please - spread the world about your local and honest gaming site that is still one hundred percent independent - and how we're looking for more fan support. Thank you guys again – we love you all! We’ll see you next month!

If you haven’t backed us on Patreon or Subscribestar, check us out! If you simply want to keep browsing the site for free, please consider whitelisting us so we can remain independent and keep the lights on.

-Brandon Orselli Founder, Editor-in-Chief