Polycount and Patreon
founder
Hello all,
We've set up a Patreon page for Polycount last night. We have posted a long post there on the reasons. I'm going to include it below as it says everything about this already:
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I'm setting this page up to help fund Polycount. As we've grown over the 19 years we've been here, so have our operating costs. We're now spending between 1500 to 2000 USD per month on keeping the lights on. Our growth has also given us monthly expenses that we never had in the past like accountants, lawyers, and business taxes.
The majority of our funding comes from being a service provider on the Steam Workshop. This has been an amazing gift to us and helped us get the site to it's current incarnation. It helped me to concentrate on running the site as a job rather than balance it as a second job as I had for well over a decade. Unfortunately the Workshop revenue is inconsistent and best and has fallen off dramatically over the past year. We've long offered ads which while they can help keep the lights on they are unable to sustain full time employment.
I didn't start the site to make any money. That wasn't even a consideration until years after we had become a community. As I've told many people over the years, Polycount has been my own personal karma machine. It was a happy accident that I was able to nurture into an unbelievable community for almost 20 years now. We are always looking for new ways to grow in a way that still keeps us true to ourselves and our community. I embrace this as a challenge for us to overcome and do not want to take a heavy hand to monetize the site. All of us that work behind the scenes at Polycount hope that you can understand appreciate the balance we try to keep as we continue to nurture the community.
My current focus is looking for a new full time job. It's the number one thing I personally can do to help make Polycount more financially secure over the long run. Once I am supporting myself with an outside income, Polycount will be able to move forward as we'll have more funding to pay designers and programmers for the sorts of things we want to bring to the community. I will continue to do the same things I always have, I'm just hoping to go back to being paid with karma.
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So far, we're received awesome support for you all and at this writing, it hasn't even been 24 hours yet.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
There is also a few that have made some disparaging remarks over this too. I'm not going to address those directly as most of the comments have shown zero insight into the reality of running a unique community such as ours. Some have compared this with some other game development communities efforts to generate funds for outside ventures. I can assure you many times over that that is not the case with us. Polycount is where we are focused. We also want to be transparent about what is going on here. The site is not close to financial death. Is it unhealthy? Yes and that's why we are asking for help before things get dire. This wasn't our first plan, or even our 2nd one. This also not our only solution to this. We're working daily on other sources of income too. We are all going to continue to enjoy our community for years to come. If you have any specific questions about what we are doing with the funds we generate, please ask. We aren't going to release our tax returns here, but we will be open about what we are doing.
Again, Thank you for your support. We are all going to work to continue to earn it daily.
Sincerely,
Andrew "rogue13" Risch
Founder @ Polycount
We've set up a Patreon page for Polycount last night. We have posted a long post there on the reasons. I'm going to include it below as it says everything about this already:
====================
I'm setting this page up to help fund Polycount. As we've grown over the 19 years we've been here, so have our operating costs. We're now spending between 1500 to 2000 USD per month on keeping the lights on. Our growth has also given us monthly expenses that we never had in the past like accountants, lawyers, and business taxes.
The majority of our funding comes from being a service provider on the Steam Workshop. This has been an amazing gift to us and helped us get the site to it's current incarnation. It helped me to concentrate on running the site as a job rather than balance it as a second job as I had for well over a decade. Unfortunately the Workshop revenue is inconsistent and best and has fallen off dramatically over the past year. We've long offered ads which while they can help keep the lights on they are unable to sustain full time employment.
I didn't start the site to make any money. That wasn't even a consideration until years after we had become a community. As I've told many people over the years, Polycount has been my own personal karma machine. It was a happy accident that I was able to nurture into an unbelievable community for almost 20 years now. We are always looking for new ways to grow in a way that still keeps us true to ourselves and our community. I embrace this as a challenge for us to overcome and do not want to take a heavy hand to monetize the site. All of us that work behind the scenes at Polycount hope that you can understand appreciate the balance we try to keep as we continue to nurture the community.
My current focus is looking for a new full time job. It's the number one thing I personally can do to help make Polycount more financially secure over the long run. Once I am supporting myself with an outside income, Polycount will be able to move forward as we'll have more funding to pay designers and programmers for the sorts of things we want to bring to the community. I will continue to do the same things I always have, I'm just hoping to go back to being paid with karma.
======================
So far, we're received awesome support for you all and at this writing, it hasn't even been 24 hours yet.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
There is also a few that have made some disparaging remarks over this too. I'm not going to address those directly as most of the comments have shown zero insight into the reality of running a unique community such as ours. Some have compared this with some other game development communities efforts to generate funds for outside ventures. I can assure you many times over that that is not the case with us. Polycount is where we are focused. We also want to be transparent about what is going on here. The site is not close to financial death. Is it unhealthy? Yes and that's why we are asking for help before things get dire. This wasn't our first plan, or even our 2nd one. This also not our only solution to this. We're working daily on other sources of income too. We are all going to continue to enjoy our community for years to come. If you have any specific questions about what we are doing with the funds we generate, please ask. We aren't going to release our tax returns here, but we will be open about what we are doing.
Again, Thank you for your support. We are all going to work to continue to earn it daily.
Sincerely,
Andrew "rogue13" Risch
Founder @ Polycount
Replies
Sometimes an ad will error out, but that seems to be on the ad server end of things.
Thanks for your support people!
Cheers!
As a fringe benefit, all Polycounters now have properly-colored ranks in their Profile pages. They used to be just gray in there.
This is the first time I use patreon, so I am not sure exactly how I "link" my polycount to it, though.
Thanks again for contributing!
I mean I pledged a small amount but I didn't get the rank, so I was wondering if there's something I should do that I've not done.
Basically what Spoon said:
That's nice to know.
Thanks.
Thanks to everyone who has donated. It literally warms my heart seeing all your names in there.
@Odow I think you can make a 1-time donation if you like, and not make it recurring.
Send me a message if you don't see yours update properly. There might be a typo here or there, as it's a bit of a manual process. Should be good though.
Thanks for your support!
The support from everyone is truly a blessing, it makes a difference. This community has always been great and it definitely still delivers!