Hey Niche Gamer Nation, Brandon here. You all probably know my name or have seen my articles, they make up the majority of Niche Gamer’s content. I’ll start this off by somewhat reintroducing myself a bit.

I’m a lifelong gamer, I’ve been gaming for as long as I can remember and I’ve always been extremely passionate about the industry. I had the idea for Niche Gamer last summer when I had finally given up trying to be the “first guy” on Facebook, posting gaming news as fast as I could.

I always wanted to start my own website dedicated to gaming, but that late night last June seemed to just spark a new concept in me.

Coming from this, I was also tired of having to go to like a dozen various websites to get all of the coverage that I wanted. I wanted to create a website that covered a crazy diverse sector of gaming, while also focusing on the very specific and targeted markets.

The games that I get most excited for and most passionate about tend to be the most unique, unknown, and or wildly strange games out there. I would see bigger websites refuse to write about certain games, while also circle jerking over the biggest ones.

I want to change that, and I want to change that in big way. #GamerGate has made me realize how much potential there is for an up-and-coming gaming website, when after months and months of slow, incremental progress I had gotten somewhat complacent.

I’ve had lots of you message me personally, tweet at me, post ask.fm questions and so on regarding how you can help with the site. You have already been helping by continuing to be amazing fans, and regular visitors as well.

However, with my limited funds (most of my day-job money goes towards my own personal bills and family) I have so far been unable to afford bringing on other writers who can do the bulk of the coverage for me, while I do PR, maintenance, marketing, and so on.

I love writing, I really do, and I want to continue to write for Niche Gamer.

The key thing here is that the majority of my writing is simply news, and I barely have time to do anything else after this. If I could even bring on two writers to help me cover the glut of news every day, this would help me immensely and enable me to divvy up the work appropriately.

This would also allow us to more aggressively tackle covering big events like E3, Gamescom, Tokyo Game Show, and so on. If I had a core group of paid writers that I could count on to provide quality content every day, it would catapult our coverage/material.

I’m not saying our existing material is subpar or that my existing or former writers are either, the issue is that all of us have day jobs, families, etc, and it’s very hard to justify and or motivate people to work for free, for a startup, on a regular basis.

I want us to do more content, more forms of content (video, livestreaming, etc), but with our busy schedules and the fact that no one can take a salary, it’s hard to encourage people to keep busting their butts for the hope of the site making real money off ad revenue.

So, this long winded (apologies for that) piece is to set up a proposition to you all – what if I opened up a Patreon for Niche Gamer? Would you be ok with that? Would you consider donating even a dollar a month? What kind of reward tiers would you like to see?

This is a very experimental avenue and it must be handled delicately and appropriately.

To be clear, I am still on the fence about this as I do not want to sully the relationship that I and Niche Gamer have with you all. While a good number of people may be screaming “YES!”, some people might be neutral, or indifferent, or maybe even adverse to the idea.

I’ve never wanted to publicly ask for money, and I do not want to give that impression here. If we opened up a Patreon, it would be entirely optional and it would only have fun reward tiers for the fans who want to have more impact on the site, like having regular meetings, op-editorials, and so on.

The potential extra revenue from Patreon that doesn’t go to the writers would go towards maintenance and improvement of the site, like the eventual relaunch of the website, assistance with developing the legal backbone of the name and the company, and so on. There’s lots of things to do that I have mapped out, but money has always been an issue and I’ve been paying for everything myself up until this point.

Niche Gamer will continue to march onwards, and we will always have fresh and new content every day, but having a dependable amount of income to afford regular paid contributors as well as other expenses with developing the site further would help immensely.

If you’ve gotten this far and haven’t fallen asleep, I thank you. This website encapsulates my dream when it comes to the video games industry, and I hope that you guys and gals will continue to help me create it, together.

Seriously, thank you guys so much for all of your support this far, it’s incredibly humbling to myself, my staff, my wife, and the rest of my family and fans. I wouldn’t keep doing this if it wasn’t for our combined passion for these games, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart.