Once again, it’s time to check in on the finances for Critical Distance.
Last year, I said the finances were on the brink of stability. We never actually achieved that stability: we are unlikely to survive another year without some negative changes. Our Patreon needs $60/mo more to continue through the next year. It continues to be the case that most months we are only $10 short from balanced books, but big features like the yearly roundup take lots of effort, and means continuing to dip into our dwindling savings. Have you signed up for our Patreon? It could easily make the difference!
Furthermore, we’re continuing to encounter problems with the site. As AI crawlers suck up all the written text in sight, we had to retreat behind a CloudFlare wall to prevent rogue bots from draining our hosting bandwidth and processing. That in turn seems to have damaged our RSS feed. While new prospects for preserving game writing and preventing linkrot do pop up, we have to balance spending our limited time on that against things like “The site isn’t loading” or “Things are getting slower to load”. Getting $100/mo more to our Patreon ($965/mo) would help us start addressing actual problems.
Here’s how you can help us continue to survive after a decade and a half of collecting the best writing on the web:
- Talk about us! Link to us from your social media pages, or in your Discord servers, or on your Twitch streams, or even in real life! If everyone who read this site found 1 new person to read it regularly, that would likely draw enough supporters in organically to fix our money issues.
- Donate to our Patreon, and encourage others to donate. Your money goes directly to paying our curators to read, select, and draw connections behind works we find meaningful. $5/mo is a meaningful contribution – if 20 more people gave $5 a month, we would be back in sustainable territory ($965/mo).
- Join our Discord community. It’s for everyone who wants to talk about games and games writing, regardless of whether you are a Patreon or not. Help participate or even run some community activities, suggest other ways to continue making Critical Distance the place to find the best games writing on the Internet, or just chill out and talk about games!
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. Your support helps us do that. Let’s keep Critical Distance sustainable!