Three months ago almost to the day, the Massively OP team came to you, the MMO community, with a promise and a request. AOL took a dump on us and video games, but we’re not done yet, we said. We all have something awesome here. Keep us alive, and we’ll work for you. And that’s exactly what we’ve done over the last three months. Three months! It feels like a thousand weeks, all crammed into just three months of writing and banks and lawyers and bugs and analytics and spreadsheets and plugins and coding and coding and coding. I’ve crashed our server only once (so far) tinkering with the perfect set of blog mods! And damn, you guys are all still here commenting and supporting us.
You made all of this happen. Thanks to your generosity on Kickstarter 12 weeks ago and the hard work of our writers, tech engineers, and sales staff, we were able to keep Massively Overpowered up and will be able to keep her going for quite a bit longer. But we’ve always known that Kickstarter was not a permanent solution. It was quite literally a kickstart. You’ve made sure we didn’t go into debt while we built a company from scratch, but a lump sum by definition isn’t sustainable income. That’s why we’ve been working on securing sponsorships and advertising revenue, and today, as promised, we’re launching our Patreon.
Patreon is a little bit different from Kickstarter in that it’s designed to encourage users to pledge a few dollars a month like a magazine subscription. Some Patreon creators do paywall content just for those subscribers, but we’re hoping to avoid that and focus on other incentives — the primary incentive being keeping the site online! But we’ll dole out other thank-yous to our patrons, like credits and badges (akin to those offered in the Kickstarter) as well as early access to some MOP content and specific avenues for participating in the site. There are also some larger rewards intended for one-off contributions from people who want to sponsor a specific chunk of content (we’ll work around Patreon’s infrastructure to make those happen).
We hope to strike a fair balance between our early bird Kickstarter donors and our long-term Patreon supporters as well as allow our community to sponsor what we do without dictating the terms. You’ll let us know if we can do even better! Thank you all so much for your support in keeping the site and the staff online and awesome.
With love,
SUPPORT MASSIVELYOP ON PATREON
