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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[RoyalEF]

The change seems to have been primarily driven by content providers that use Patreon as a paywall rather than as a donations box, because it allowed some people to pledge mid-month, get access, and then cancel their pledge before actually being charged. To fight that, they decided to have all pledges charged when they actually pledge, and then on each monthly anniversary after that. But this would make aggregation impossible, raising processing fees significantly. So essentially they went after something that at least I see as a relatively small problem by creating a far greater one, and by completely misunderstanding what value they add to the process (primarily aggregation).

The problem with this is that Patreon did this wrong from the start. There are thousands of memberships and services out there and none of them have this issue, because they either terminate at the end of month, after charged, or pro-rate for the part of the month used. If you request the subscription to terminate, it would terminate at the end of the month, charging you for already taking access and possibly reading dozens of content articles. End of story. Lots of models do this. And if they terminate access instantly they charge you for the part of the month. For such micro-payments, it would not be wild to say full charge of the month regardless of how many days you had access.

Patreon would have serviced their creators and patron better if they launched with a wild, crazy and never heard of financing model of.... starbucks, dunkin donuts, ez-pass and MANY more. Give ME, the patron control over when *I* incur and pay the full bank fees. I set a low balance and replenishment amount. I get charged the full fee for paypal or CC, which is under my control. I could opt to load a year's worth of pledges onto my Patreon account, paying one fee a year--saving me money (fees are mine to control and pay). Creators get my pledge minus Patreon's service fee (5%). Done. Problems solved by adopting a finance model appropriate to the business.