gamersnexus patreon

How Patreon's Changes Hurt Creators (& You)

🕑 Added 2017-12-07 19:07:33 +0000 UTC

Comments

gamersglory

Best thing would be to cut out the Patreon Middle man

Paypal ambitiously charges fees as well. Not defending Patreon for their recent BS (I also rebelled) but the root of the problem is credit card companies (i.e. VISA) charging royalty fees for the use of their services. This fee, thankfully, has never been charged to the customer since they want you to use the cards. Anyways I hope they reconsider the whole thing since I'd drop them in a heartbeat if the change somehow goes through silently (which I doubt.)

With the fees in mind, I'd love to skip the Patreon and just dump money into a GN PayPal, Square Cash, or Venmo account. With a bank account, there wouldn't be any fees.

seerpea

You'd be surprised. Anyway, I don't think it so much a greed grab, the float from all those fees is just not going to be that much. I think the real goal is to get rid of the $1 donations and to get all contributors to go monthly instead of per item.

They got really greedy. They will still charge credit card company a lump sum, yet we are paying per pledge. They are taking us for a ride here and pocketing the difference and all along claiming its for our own good. I hate it. $100 for one person comes to $103 yet $100 per 100 creators comes to $135? Greed will cost them, people are not this stupid.

Oddly enough, this change made me become a backer. I've wanted to back for a while as poor college student, but I recently graduated and started working so I can afford it now. This news reminded me, and since I've never used Patreon before I haven't felt the increase.

Dons and efes have been in the middle on customer and business for ages taking money for nothing, Money-horney diks wont take my support-money which is for GN. Paypal it it then.

They should at least allow creators or backers to be able to switch between systems, that way everyone's happy. I mean a slightly discounted $2 from ten backers is still more than getting a full $2 from only five backers because half left due to the unwanted changes. People singed up for one thing, and that one thing is what they expect, and it works too. In other words, if it aint broke, don't fix it. It really isn't rocket science.

I'm gong to let this ride for a month and see what Patreon does in that time but I have a feeling that I will simply close my account next month and try to support you via other channels. Paying $0.38 to make a $1.00 donation is just stupid. I'd rather just mail you twelve bucks for the year. Seriously.

I definitely don't think it's right to see Patreon like a tip jar. In fact, I see it as a modern take on patronage, the practice of wealthy donors providing a living stipend for artistic creators for the purpose of advancing the arts. These days, patronage still takes place but generally in drastically different forms. Wealthy donors generally create foundations to administer their patronage. Patreon is a way for those of us who aren't wealthy to continue the tradition of patronage. By drawing together large numbers of relatively small donations, we can collectively be the patrons for creators who don't have a business model that is conducive the economic systems we have today. In cases like GN, this means allowing them to stay unbiased, and avoid business relationships that might appear to compromise their integrity.

hidden

I deeply apologize for suspending my support through Patreon, please message me with alternative avenues so I can continue my support to GamersNexus. I feel like a larger sum less frequently would work better for me anyway.

Agreed. Patreon doesn't offer us anything so charging us a fee to give us nothing is kinda stupid IMO. Making it more expensive for me to give money away is NOT an incentive for me to keep giving it away. It's like me giving you $100 and you charging me $1 to take it. Patreon needs to realize WE are not their customers....the content creators are. We don't need Patreon, at all. It's very shortsighted to be charging the people that DON'T need you for a service they DON'T need.

I agree with your assessment. I'll still be backing, but I agree that this discourages small donations.

Thanks for taking the time to write this out. If you find another platform without this kind of fee structure, do let us know.

Pretty much my reaction to this as well. I say this in a very respectful way: Eff them.

Sorry to drop you, GN, but I'm speaking up against with my wallet. Hopefully they rethink this change. edit: I left some pretty clear feedback to how I felt about it; bs excuse is expected but the time wasted's worth the rant.

This seems like a normal business tactic. Often times when some companies want to generate more revenue, they will raise prices, often times a ridiculous amount knowing that there will be backlash. They purposely raise them quite high knowing that later on they can roll the pricing back some so it seems like they are meeting their customers halfway all the time knowing that they are settling for the pricing they originally wanted anyway. This way the customer feels like they've been heard and they think they accomplished something when in reality, they just got played.

I agree with your analysis, as I would expect, good analysis is one reason why I became a supporter in the first place. I won't be canceling my pledge to GamersNexus, but I'll have to re-examine a few others, and this change will make it less likely that I'll add new pledges as I have in the past.

As a follow up, I would encourage anybody upset by this change to submit a complaint email to patreon here: <a href="https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new</a> I have canceled all my pledges at this point and will be looking for other systems to support the creators that I enjoy, either through directly gifting paypal money or whatever other means present themselves.

I can see both sides of the argument. For Patreon to grow, they'd need more money. If this is purely a cash grab because of how well the business model is doing, then I don't agree with this move. If it's because they're going to grow and expand their services or bring us new features/benefits or whatever, then I'm sorta ok with it. Reading their email again, it sounds more like a win win for them and the creators by shifting the burden onto the patrons. I'm leaning towards the unhappy camp but, these services aren't free. Someone's gotta pay the employees over at Patreon somehow. I'm willing to take on the fees but I know this will affect many other's in their decision on how to move forward with their subs. My last thought is this: after reading your post, Steve, my decision to support you has been bolstered. I'm proud to be a patron and will continue to do so and will gladly shoulder the fee being passed unto me. Cheers m8

ZarconDeeGrissom

I've been giving it some thought. Not the giving GN backing (I've already made that choice), the fees bit. I know many think of Patreon as a tip jar at a coffee shop, I'm one of a few that feel it is a bit more. I know all too well that waters and waitresses wouldn't make ends meet without tips, and thus I feel it should be enough to count for something. I guess however this goes down, in the end, Patreon needs a bit more to keep afloat is the bottom line. You are correct as this does affect the number of other creators I was considering backing, and I guess time will tell if I can add more to existing commitments I've already made.

Levis

I don't care that much, if I need to pay a small extra fee for Patreon or not. Of course it would be a lot more elegant to do the same way as until now, and hide such fees from the pledgers altogether. But at least it would be a lot better, if the fee would be static per account or just a percentage from pledges. If it's going to be like this, I'm going to pay $1.60 more for my relatively small $7 total of pledges. And VAT on top that as well of course, so $1.99 more per month in practice. It's not the end of the world, but kind of feels bad since I could support one whole extra patreon with that.

Agreed, it's total BS. We're not dumb, we know the vast majority of contributors fall into the category of huge losses for creators and more profit for Patreon. Did they think nobody would notice?

Mike Cullen

I totally agree, if i was purchasing anything else online/instore (Netflix, pc parts) its them that pays tje processing fees, because its the price of business and they want our business.

Agree with everything you have said, and had all the same thoughts when I read the email I got from Patreon about the change. I totally understand that Patreon needs to make money to keep the system going but this seems like literally the worst solution possible. Part of what makes Patreon so amazing is the simple subscribing and even $ amounts. It makes way more sense to restructure the fees on the creator end and take more money out of that end if needed. That way they can allow the creator to decide if they might need to increase the price of the pledge tiers. All this does is make and incredibly simple system for the patrons into something much more convoluted. It actively discourages supporting more creators and will almost certainly slow down patron growth across the board. It just screams of classic horrible business decisions that are made based on incredibly short term value rather than long term. Now that they have done this, what is going to stop them from increasing the flat fee to $.50 or even $1? It opens up massive uncertainty for me, wondering if they have projected either getting acquired or are losing money and this is just a big money grab to get as many people's money for as long as they can before they kick the bucket.