Patreon's Policy Changes and the VGHF

Hi everyone,

As most of you have probably heard by now, Patreon had a recent policy change. For the specifics, I refer you to byuu's post on the matter - partially because it breaks down the numbers in an easily digestible way, but mostly because this is my sly way of making you aware of their campaign and hoping you can contribute to it too.

We actually prepared a statement for the media about this, which I'll reproduce here as it sums up my feelings pretty well:

What's most upsetting to me about this change is that it punishes Patreon's poorer contributors. We're a public charity, and we don't offer any perks below the $5 tier, so the $1 and $2 donors we see every month are doing so purely out of kindness. These are people who have faith in what we're doing and want to help in whatever way they can, even if they don't get anything out of it. To suddenly pull the rug out from underneath them breaks my heart. Those $1 tips are votes of confidence in what we're doing, and I would have much rather kept them and eaten more fees. We've lost five so far today, which is a pretty big deal when your total's in the 200s, and I expect it to get worse. 

For you all specifically, I wanted to make sure you were aware of three things:

1. This isn't hurting us...financially

Full disclosure: even with the dropoffs, we're maintaining at about the same level we have since we started in February, and are maybe even up a little. Partially this is because the new policy actually pays us a little more out of the pledges than before, and partially it's because after complaining about the change on Twitter, some people increased their pledges, and some even pledged for the first time.

If you'd like to contribute more money to what we're doing, of course we'd love that! Every dollar is going right into the work, and there's a lot of it to be done. But if you're wanting to give us more because you want to bandage some of the loss, don't worry about us please.

2. Don't let us stop you from voting with your dollars

If you're so opposed to this change that you want to stop giving money to Patreon entirely, I really can't fault you for that. If there is any guilt preventing that from happening right now because you don't want to stop giving to us, please erase that from your mind and do what you feel needs to be done. I want all of my patrons here to be happy, and besides, there are plenty of other ways to support us:

3. Reminder: we take other forms of payment, too!

Check out our official donation page, which has been the same since the day we launched in February:

http://gamehistory.org/donate 

As you can see, we take donations via Stripe, Paypal, and check-by-mail as well. Traditionally we've been pushing Patreon front and center as our preferred donation vehicle, for two reasons:

1. We're trying to build up a community of like-minded people to interact with and, frankly, keep me company. It was really the Discord integration that sealed the deal for us: our Discord community has allowed me to discover amazing new projects, learn (and in some cases, develop!) new techniques, and make new friends.

2. We like the monthly cadence a lot. It's really just me doing all of the financials for the company right now, so having a predictable monthly cashflow has made planning and budgeting WAY easier than it would have been if we had sought a large lump sum in a Kickstarter or something.

For those reasons, I'd like to ask that if you are considering ditching Patreon, you consider switching to a monthly donation either via PayPal or Stripe (they're about equal to us, in terms of fees, so whichever way you like is good with us) using the URL above.

And now, a question:

Are there any of you considering leaving Patreon but are afraid of losing your perks with us? If this is an actual issue we can work on figuring out how to fix that, but I don't know if this is an actual issue yet. Please let us know.

I LOVE YOU ALL,

-Frank