Video game media isn’t doing so hot. The past few years have been studded by layoffs and site closures. This year alone, Eurogamer, Polygon, The Verge, Inverse, AV Club, and more have cut staff.
It’s the same story across the wider media industry, too. Thousands of journalists have been laid off. There’s a mix of reasons: A lack of advertising money, fewer clicks thanks to Google’s insistence on pushing generative AI, divided attention, and the ever-changing nature of how people consume news. Executives are so far removed from the actual day-to-day work of producing journalism, and insist on making decisions that decimate their companies.
Some journalists, out of jobs with few options for new ones, have turned to independence—taking a cue from the worker-owned, independent outlets that came before them, like Defector. Independent games media continues to grow and there are now multiple publications dedicated to games: Aftermath, Rascal News, Rogue, Mothership, Post Games, Skybox, The Indie Informer, People Make Games, Game File, and more.
Traditional, corporate thinking would label these publications as competitors. According to Aftermath co-founder Riley MacLeod, that’s accurate in some ways. There are limited dollars and time to go around, but MacLeod feels indie media publications can do things differently than their more mainstream counterparts.
Instead of competing, they can help each other.
“Bigger picture, I think a lot of us are realizing how challenging being a small outlet can be, and we’re exploring if we can pool our needs or resources to do more together than we could do on our own,” MacLeod explained. “I think that in some ways it’s true that we’re ‘competitors,’ but we also know that people sub to lots of different sites, and I would hope readers are happier to support an ecosystem of people working together than some kind of cut-throat competitive market.”
One way to do that is with subscription bundles. It’s an idea that is perhaps a touch old school, according to Rascal News co-founder and editing lead Chase Carter, who notes that people used to bundle together physical magazine subscriptions all the time.
“Bundling subscriptions is an old model, relative to modern media,” Carter said. “But the platform-dominated internet isn’t built to handle it. Our own webhosts and CMS can’t support it as yet. With Trustfnd as the connective tissue, we essentially sold a discounted sampler of five websites for a month with the hope that it would entice one site’s existing audience to try a different flavor of independent media.”
With that goal in mind, Podcast Never Post and games websites Aftermath, Rogue, and Rascal News partnered up to create the Independent Media Collective bundle.
They used Trustfnd, founded by Michaël Jarjour and René Piftzner, which is designed specifically to help publications on the Ghost and Beehiiv platforms create bundles and (hopefully) drive subscriptions. Carter said both car culture publication Alloy and video essayist Jenna Stoeber both participated in spirit, because they operate on platforms that aren’t compatible with Trustfnd just yet. The collective instead sent out discounts for their publications.
“Independent journalists are now the primary source of information for millions and millions of people—including me,” Jarjour told Game Developer. “I used to be a reporter myself and then started working on the tech and business of journalism. Independent journalists fill the gaps that cratering institutions have left, serving many niches that legacy media has given up on. But in today’s ecosystem, the cards are stacked against journalism. New audience growth now comes from platforms that can turn downright hostile to journalism overnight.”
“We knew we were acting as guinea pigs for a barely soft-launched software and accepted that role gladly.”
Trustfnd wants to help journalists navigate those challenges. Jarjour said it’s about letting writers and publications “grow faster and earn more together.” The platform came out of beta in May and the Independent Media Collective bundle was, in part, a test run. Before that, Trustfnd worked with The Handbasket, Local News International, Spitfire News, and Garbage Day. Trustfnd is accessible to journalists for $25 a month, and Jarjour said journalists “pay nothing until they grow and can pause or cancel anytime.”
“It worked well but imperfectly, both in a technical and results-minded sense,” explained Carter, appraising the impact of the bundle. “We knew we were acting as guinea pigs for a barely soft-launched software and accepted that role gladly.”
Carter said the bundle sold 835 subscriptions at a 50 percent discount, which added up to $12 for a month’s subscription to four websites. That generated $2,478.50 for the group to split evenly. “That probably doesn’t sound like a lot of money, and it isn’t when compared to what sponsored content, ad revenue, or promotional deals can bring in,” Carter added. “But this was an experiment in cross-promotion with very little work needed on our end.”
Rogue co-founder Cass Marshall said the bundle was “a huge boon” for the website, which they explained is the “smallest outlet” that took part. “While it’s not as simple as someone simply subbing through the site, any drawbacks are made up for with visibility,” they added.
Rogue was established by ex-Polygon colleagues following layoffs in 2025 and has been operating for roughly a year. “I think we’re more aware of our limitations, and better situated as writers,” Marshall said. “I’m hoping to keep doing deep dive stuff like the History of Helldivers, but I feel a lot more confident in cataloging some of the weirder parts of internet culture and how they intersect with the industry.”
MacLeod said Aftermath saw the least sales, because anybody already subscribed to the site didn’t have to pay again. For context, any outlet a person was already subscribed to was removed from the bundle, and the bundle price was adjusted accordingly. “This suggests to me that a lot of our subscribers checked out new-to-them sites via the bundle,” MacLeod said. “I’m really happy about this, and really glad if we used our bigger size to help boost our peers’ work.”
The bundle, which ended recently, offered a month’s subscription to participating websites. MacLeod said they’re still figuring out how effective the bundle was at generating new subscriptions. Once the bundle ended, subscribers needed to re-subscribe to individual sites. Carter, however, noted that people aren’t sticking around as Rascal News has hoped.
“Everyone is facing subscription churn that, based on those who self-reported when cancelling, can be attributed to rising cost of living, an onset recession, and a political reality that makes internet memberships feel like even more of a luxury,” Carter added. “It is what it is, as they say.”
Carter explained that participating publications didn’t expect the bundle to be a “silver bullet to our financial struggles.” For little extra work, all involved were successful in bringing in new readers for each other. “Solidarity feels like a very important part of the scene right now, for which I am grateful,” Marshall said.
The next step for a bundle like this is figuring out how to reduce friction.
“I understand why the system works this way but worry it’s a bit clunky and easy to lose the bundle momentum,” MacLeod said. “But being able to actually do this thing readers have wanted for so long was really exciting—like so much of owning a business, bundled subs sound so easy until you actually start trying to figure them out, and then there’s all these little challenges and technical hurdles. So even if this first foray doesn’t ultimately net us a ton of new subscribers (though I hope it does!) I’m still really glad we did it.”
Experimentation is a way forward. Independent media has its pain points—fewer people doing a lot of different jobs, job security, and reaching sustainability.
Yet, for Carter, that’s all part of the process. “So much of the independent media project is imperfect experimentation, taking cautious steps into the unknown without a map or a guide. I wish our margin for failure wasn’t so razor thin, but it beats another round of layoffs from a Jim Spanfeller wannabe.”
[Ed. note: Nicole Carpenter contributes to Aftermath, and has been published on several independent websites like Rogue, Rascal News, and others.]
Source link
#happened #independent #game #publications #revived #bundles
