Join The RPS Supporter Program, Fund Great Writing, Receive Free Gifts, And Satisfy Horace The Endless Bear

It's been six months since we launched the RPS Supporter Program, the method through which wonderful people help us produce words and videos about PC games. This means that, for those who paid for the six month package, your accounts will be about to expire.

This is where we try to compel you to re-subscribe, with new gifts and reminders of all we've accomplished together.

What is the Supporter program?

If you don't know, here's how it works. If you pay $20 for 6 months or $35 for 12 months, you get access to one extra RPS feature per weekday. The days are split according to writer: Adam on Monday, Pip on Tuesday, John on Wednesday, Alec on Thursday and Graham on Friday. The style of the article runs the gamut from powerful personal essays to deep historical research to exposés about shitty unicorns.

Do you get anything other than scratchy words and handsome pictures?

You also get access to a set of free gifts, which currently includes a Horace hat for Team Fortress 2, an RPS robe for Magicka: Wizard Wars [which you can read about here], and as of yesterday, a free Steam key for the original Magicka and a skin for the Smite character Kukulkan. We've got more to come, too. Gifts added after your initial subscription date are added to your package retroactively, so there's no need to wait - and if you're already subscribed, go claim your Magicka and Smite codes by logging into your Humble account now. If you're new, you can see more details on those gifts and how to sign up on the Support RPS page.

What happens to the money you make?

The money the Supporter program makes then gets fed back into paying our contributors to make even more words and pictures about videogames. In the past six months, you've helped fund a terrifying amount of new work: retrospectives on forgotten RPGs, experimental writing about mech games and shmups, series on the future of AI in games and events for party games, video series about personal gaming history from Rab and mechanics from Quinns, and much, much more.

Without your support, these articles simply wouldn't exist.

I can't afford to pay and this makes me feel excluded.

Please, don't! When we first started the Program, we initially imagined that what people were paying for was exclusive articles - words and pictures crafted just for them, in a corner of the internet that they could call home. As it turned out, the RPS community is far lovelier than we anticipated and the feedback was almost unanimous: you wanted everyone to be able to read this stuff. That's why all of the articles linked above were made available for free to everyone, and why many of the articles that are written exclusively for the Supporter program end up being made available to all within the same week. If you're not a Supporter or you're not logged in, you can go here to see the previously private articles that are now viewable to one and all.

We always said that the Supporter program wouldn't cause us to post fewer articles on the main site. It's also resulted in us posting a lot more. That'll never change.

I'm already a supporter. How do I know if my subscription is about to expire?

Thank you! That means so much to us.

Our auto-mailer isn't working at the moment, which means the best way to check whether you're about to be left forlorn and hungry is to search your own email for a record of when you subscribed. If it was around six months ago, then it's about to expire. We're working on getting the mailer working again now - and finally also trying to get a Supporter-only RSS feed working too, so you can keep informed as to what we've written for you even when you're not logged into the site.

I have other questions that aren't answered by the artificial structure of this article.

There's more information on the Support RPS page, where you can also signup immediately. Drop comments in the comment hole below or email Graham. We're always open to ideas, even if we lack the baseline of competence required to implement them.

Horace thanks you.