Starting… uh, last week, we’re making a bunch of improvements to the RPS Supporter Program, the super-special subscription service through which impossibly cool RPS readers can support our writing and reporting directly. The catch? Ha ha! There isn’t one.
Before getting into the details, I hope you’ll permit me some context dumping, because my god some of this stuff has been bothering me for ages. It’s probably not a secret that the RPS crew, particularly on the editorial side, have had to stretch ourselves in recent times. One of the casualties of that has been the Supporter Program, as re-focusing our attention elsewhere has meant fewer exclusive articles and a general lack of housekeeping. Through occasional inspiration and Sin Vega’s excellent Scout Report series, we’d kept to the letter of our promise for fresh Supporter articles every week, but for a while now, it’s felt like we’d only found time for this bare minimum.
That had to change. Besides the beancounting, business-o-fact that a minimal offering would do little to attract new subscribers, we should absolutely be providing more to existing Supporters: those who can get the vast majority of RPS writing for free, and are generous enough to fund us anyway. To that end, here’s what you can expect from the Program going forward:
Supporters on the Premium tier will now see more frequent posts for their eyes only, beginning with last week’s double-hit of Sin-scribed Crabmeat impressions and my ode to a magnet. Expect additional insights and nonsense from a wider range of the RPS Treehouse, on a wider range of topics, as well as continued indie game spotlights from Sin herself.
Likewise, we’re also going to revive the ancient practice of reposting older Supp posts so that they’re free to read for everyone. This won’t be the case for every single exclusive, not least because some of them will be related to time-specific events that would make them a bit weird to read 12 months later. But we will be taking a curated approach to these, so non-subscribers can get a taste of our finest Supporter words..
Hiding ads has always been a key perk to being an RPS Supporter, though until last week, we didn’t have the backend tech in place to extend this to the more recent development of sponsored content. Now, we do. If you’re logged into RPS with your Supporter account, you should never see sponsored content (unless you find and click a direct link to it), and if you do, you can email Julian to get it fixed. And, of course, both the Standard and Premium tiers will continue to get the same ad-free browsing they’ve had for years.
This dates waaaaaaaay back before our current staffing levels, but no, we have not been posting monthly Ed letters when we really should have been posting monthly Ed letters. Julian and I will be sharing the duty of fixing that, making sure Supporters are the first to hear of any interesting RPS gossip, explanations of our thinking behind certain projects, or just how everything’s been going lately. Hopefully that sounds agreeable, though you might have to forgive the detail of neither of us having the job title of Editor.
While much of this whole refresh deal is about bringing back Ye Olde Ways of the Supporter Program, we also want to do something new, as well as a bit different from what you might get from other games site subscriptions. Chief among these will be more BTS-style articles, which will come in addition to the aforementioned boost in exclusive, more conventionally game-focused features. These posts will either reveal a glimpse of how the RPS sausage is made, or reconstruct the cutting-room-floor scraps that some of you sickos actually like reading.
At the end of each month, we’ll gather up all the Supp-exclusive articles we’ve posted into a convenient list, readable by anyone (and not unlike this). Supporters, you’ll get a handy one-stop recap of any pieces you may have missed, and Supporters Yet to Be… well, I mean, just look at all this rad shit you’re missing.
Pricing for both the Standard and Premium tiers will remain unchanged, and while that’s all the confirmed improvements we have to share right now, they aren’t necessarily the only ones that could be made in the foreseeable future. I’ll be running a survey to, among other things, find out what you want from the Supporter Program, and am also investigating the possibility of more game/item code giveaways as well. We’re operating in a very different industry to the one where we could extract hundreds of free games from publishers on a regular basis, but while I can’t promise to secure this perk, I do promise to try*.
It’s a pleasure and honestly kind of a relief to be sharing this news; several of these changes I pitched to management almost a year ago, and it’s exciting to see them finally take shape on the site. More than anything, I hope Supporters appreciate them, a fraction as much as we appreciate the patronage. Not signed up? You too can support us here.
*Nowt I can do about discounts on RPS merch, mind. That Teespring store is deader than an entire asset library of Bethesda skeletons.
