I last gave an update on Critical Distance’s finances at the beginning of 2024. Now that it’s a new year, it seems like a good time to check in again.
We are just on the brink of financial stability. Some months we are only $10 short from balanced books, but the work we put into the yearly roundup means we were $400 short of being able to pay our excellent curators to review an entire year’s worth of writing without dipping into our savings last month. Have you signed up for our Patreon? It could easily make the difference!
We did have to stop running the video roundups. They were time consuming and therefore costly to run. We experimented with them for a few months, which dipped into our savings without bringing in any additional Patreon funding. Therefore, we don’t have the reserves to fund experiments that we desperately want to run, such as “hiring a WordPress developer to finally fix archives”. However, a generous donor was able to give us a much better search experience! We are combing through grants to try and find avenues for additional funding, but this is also a time-consuming and difficult task. (We have a channel in our Discord for this purpose if you’d like to volunteer!)
All that said, our Discord has never been livelier or more welcoming. It’s for everyone who wants to talk about games and games writing, regardless of whether you are a Patreon or not. Please feel free to join us on Discord, whether you simply want to discuss games, help run some community activities, or find ways to continue making Critical Distance the place to find the best games writing on the Internet.
As always, our Patreon is the primary way you can support us. We use this money to pay our editors to find, review and curate their favorite games writing on the internet week after week. As social media continues to fragment, we want to continue standing. Your support helps us do that. If you can’t contribute, telling your friends about our site helps too!