Hey Niche Gamer readers and fans — it’s been awhile since I’ve addressed you all directly. Both myself and our staff are proud to announce the Niche Gamer Society, our new membership club that offers you exclusive rewards and a way to help support your local, 100% independent gaming and culture site. Please read on for why us raising more fan-funded support is critical.

Most websites rely on CPM advertising rates, which are, sadly, typically very bad and not sustainable for staff salaries. We’ve been skating by with the fan-funding and advertising money for years now, but as we grow, we do not want to be reliant on advertising rates like before. I’m asking you all for help to support Niche Gamer and make us more independent from advertising rates.

We currently have a ton of new staff applications and I am looking to hire a few new staff, which we currently will squeeze into our current budget, but we obviously want to do more. The demand for more coverage has been crazy, and we want to simply talk about and review more games, every month. That simply requires more money to pay staff. I sincerely hope you consider support!

We’re roughly halfway to our initial funding goal of just $1000 a month. With that level of direct, fan-funded budget, we can be more independent from advertisers and hire more staff, and have staff produce more content. Here are the various tiers and rewards that we offer:

You can become a backer here:

Why should you consider becoming a member and supporting us? We’ve been in operation for over six years now, and we have provided consistent, daily content for our audience. We just launched our second website focused on anime and Asian culture, Nicchiban (which is a success already), and have a roadmap for more content and features. We have a proven track record for content and features, and won’t let you down.

Again, Niche Gamer and Nicchiban are 100% independent websites. We have always done our own thing, and we have many things planned for the future, including new features that will require more infrastructure. These include: a game database, game pages, user profiles with a game library you can organize from our database, user reviews, and more!

Niche Gamer has gotten as big as it has almost entirely thanks to the fans and your support with reading and sharing our content every day. We simply want to offer you more content, more coverage, and the features you’ve all been asking for — from a nonpartisan, fair and enthusiast-focused website. We simply love games, and love talking about them!

As we’ve grown and built our own community, we have started to fill the void left by old print-based enthusiast gaming press. While other websites have existed for some time now, none have really attempted to carry on the torch of old enthusiast gaming journalism. We are proud to build a new enthusiast gaming press, for the digital age.

We will continue to fight for better advertising rates, covering the latest news and reviews, all the while growing our community and audience consistently. We just really need more support from you all to help us become more independent of advertising rates. Even $1 a month helps, while $3 gets you ad-free browsing. Consider supporting the new enthusiast gaming press!