Patreon Reverses Disastrous Decision Which Harmed RPG Creators

Last week, Patreon - a service used by a lot of RPG creators - announced a policy change out of the blue. They emailed creators and patrons alike, unilaterally telling them that they were essentially passing some costs on to the patrons, and thus increasing the amount of their pledges. Creators - including us here at EN World - watched in horror as our hard-won patron bases, which we've built up over months and years, cancelled their pledges; and we could hardly blame them. Fortunately, the outcry was heard - Patreon is NOT implementing that disastrous change!

As you may know, EN World runs four Patreon campaigns, all of which were hit by Patreon's recent actions. As a result, the site has lost a signifiant amount of monthly revenue, and has been forced to cut back on freelancers, columnists, and more. It was quite a blow, and we are hardly alone - all across the RPG community (and many other industries), the same thing happened.

We're really pleased that Patreon has changed its mind. But those lost patrons are still gone. For that reason, this is a plea - if you unsubscribed from a Patreon - any Patreon - because of the recent actions, please consider re-subscribing. Every little counts, and lots of people have been impacted badly by this. In the coming week, I intend to highlight some awesome RPG Patreons to help as many as possible get back on their feet. Hopefully that will help a little. Creators have no way to contact those patrons who left, so all we can do is put the word out.

In the meantime, here are EN World's four Patreons. If you unsubscribed, please, please consider resubscribing. These things affect so many freelancers in our community, as well as the day to day running of communities like EN World. These below can be subscribed to for as little as a single dollar (and you get all the back-catalogue too!)

• EN5ider. This is our biggest Patreon, and serves 5th Edition players with rules, adventures, and more. It's also how we publish the 5E version of our ZEITGEIST adventure path. If you remember A Touch of Class, our book of new classes for 5E, that came from this Patreon.
• TRAILseeker. This Patreon serves Pathfinder. It's similar to EN5ider, and includes rules articles, adventures, and so on. We were also considering spinning out a Starfinder Patreon until last week, and we'd still love to do that.
• EONS. This one is for WOIN fans. Tons of rules articles, adventures, races, careers, and so on. Essential if you play WOIN.
• EN World. This one is for our news columns. It's just a monthly pledge - you don't directly get anything for it - but it's a way to support our freelancer program and all the columnists we use.

Are you an RPG creator on Patreon, or a patron of one? Let us know!
It's not all about us! If you know of (or run) an RPG Patreon affected by this, please post it with a link in the comments. We'll gather all of these and do a big article highlighting as many as we can next week in the hope that we can do a little good.

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[Marandahir]

I'm a Patreon supporter for EN5ider, as well as for Nintendo Prime, a Nintendo news video website whose creator I've followed for years before he went and did his own thing.

I'm glad that the changes have been reversed but terrified that the initial news got out while the updated reversal will not nearly be as noticed, thus leaving you creators in the lurch.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I don’t get the sense that it was greed. Processing fees always suck on microtransactions and I’m getting the sense that it was a “something has to change or our business model falls apart”. I imagine we will see some sort of load-sharing options in the future... either Patreon creators will need to voluntarily take less in per dollar, or the patrons will need to share cost, or the minimum pledge will need to go up. Or the credit card processors will need to change their fee structures but I’m not holding my breath on that.

It looks like a blatant cash grab to me. They were proposing to charge a service fee of 2.9 percent plus 35 cents per pledge. The service fee is fine for someone just making 1 pledge as it's understandable that Patreon needs to recoup the transaction fee charged by PayPal (or whoever).

Where it was a blatant cash grab was if someone backed 10 projects for $1. They would be charged 2.9 percent plus 35 cents per pledge, despite the fact that Patreon was only doing one $10 transaction for all 10 projects.

So basically they were charging 10 transaction fees, despite only needing to make 1 transaction and just pocketing the rest as profit.

 

[Dyson Logos]

It looks like a blatant cash grab to me. They were proposing to charge a service fee of 2.9 percent plus 35 cents per pledge. The service fee is fine for someone just making 1 pledge as it's understandable that Patreon needs to recoup the transaction fee charged by PayPal (or whoever).

Where it was a blatant cash grab was if someone backed 10 projects for $1. They would be charged 2.9 percent plus 35 cents per pledge, despite the fact that Patreon was only doing one $10 transaction for all 10 projects.

So basically they were charging 10 transaction fees, despite only needing to make 1 transaction and just pocketing the rest as profit.

While this looks like the case, the reality is that it was based on something very different.

The goal was for Patreon to switch from end-of-month processing to anniversary processing of pledges. This was to satisfy those campaigns that use the site as a paywall instead of a tip jar and who were complaining that people would sign up part way through the month, access the content, and then drop their pledge before the month was over.

Thus, a patron who is supporting seven different campaigns would now have seven different anniversary dates and would be charged on each of them instead of all in one aggregate chunk at the end of the month.

Patreon wasn't paying attention to the campaigns that use per-creation funding models who produce more than one creation per month, or to the fact that a fair percentage of patrons were supporting multiple campaigns and a few were supporting dozens of campaigns.

Yes, I agree that some of it was definitely Patreon trying to make a bit more money off the transactions, but the majority of it was just a BADLY planned and implemented attempt to change the basic funding model on the site.

 

[Matthan]

I’m an EN5ider patron, but I don’t track the numbers closely. How many people did we lose?

 

[lxqueen]

It’s still the only major player in town right now, but I’m sure lots of RPG creators are keeping a close eye on the upcoming Drip from Kickstarter.

Have you taken a look at Liberapay? Seems to be similar, and is run by a non-profit. Heard a few open-source software projects use it instead of Patreon.

 

[jmucchiello]

The goal was for Patreon to switch from end-of-month processing to anniversary processing of pledges. This was to satisfy those campaigns that use the site as a paywall instead of a tip jar and who were complaining that people would sign up part way through the month, access the content, and then drop their pledge before the month was over.

And, of course, there's a simpler solution to this problem. You charge them when they drop the pledge if they've never ever paid the pledge. Yeah, they had a problem, but they really showed how little they understood their customers.

 

[Dyson Logos]

Have you taken a look at Liberapay? Seems to be similar, and is run by a non-profit. Heard a few open-source software projects use it instead of Patreon.

Liberapay wants all projects supported through the site to be completely CC open content. CC-BY but not CC-BY-NC. I'm considering them as an alternate for my mapping because I do release four-six maps a month under a CC-BY license and could set up a campaign for JUST those maps on the site.

 

[Dreamscape]

It's a systemic problem - Patreon, YouTube, Facebook, blogging platforms, this highlights how dangerous such dependence can become. I do mean dangerous, because sometimes more than just a few (though dearly loved by us all) RPG creators are affected. There are places around the world which rely on such independent content creators for anything not filtered and controlled by their governments, and sudden, thoughtless policy changes by a few not-overly-well-informed board members can be disastrous: http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/the-evolving-role-of-news-on-twitter-and-facebook/

We really do need a move back to independent web-presences and away from these unstable commercial platforms. I've heard from several of the people I back that they have lost huge numbers overnight, and it's highly unlikely they will also come back overnight, if at all.

 

[Morrus]

We really do need a move back to independent web-presences and away from these unstable commercial platforms.

I'm trying! EN World will always be here! I hope....

I've heard from several of the people I back that they have lost huge numbers overnight, and it's highly unlikely they will also come back overnight, if at all.

Yeah, we lost hundreds over our four Patreons. So far, since Patreon rescinded it, we've regained... $7. And we've no way of reaching the lost patrons.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

It's a systemic problem - Patreon, YouTube, Facebook, blogging platforms, this highlights how dangerous such dependence can become. I do mean dangerous, because sometimes more than just a few (though dearly loved by us all) RPG creators are affected. There are places around the world which rely on such independent content creators for anything not filtered and controlled by their governments, and sudden, thoughtless policy changes by a few not-overly-well-informed board members can be disastrous: http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/the-evolving-role-of-news-on-twitter-and-facebook/

We really do need a move back to independent web-presences and away from these unstable commercial platforms. I've heard from several of the people I back that they have lost huge numbers overnight, and it's highly unlikely they will also come back overnight, if at all.

Youtube especially is really becoming dodgy.