Experimenting with Patreon and Article-Writing

Hello, Gamasutra. I've been writing articles for this site and my own site (www.keithburgun.net) for over five years now. In that time, I've made ends meet via book advances and by getting freelance art and design jobs.

With my latest book contract finished, I'd really like to be able to focus more on my article writing. I'd like to write articles much more frequently, and push the envelope for quality with each new article. I'd also like to be able to update my existing articles and keep my website up to date. I don't know of a lot of other game design article authors who do that - constantly patching previous articles and pages to keep them up to date, so that the site serves as an up-to-date "reference" for this kind of work.

I recently did an overhaul of my site, adding a "featured articles" page, that lays them out in a grid, like so:

I'm still in the process of updating all of my articles, but basically this page will serve as the major hub for all of my work.

Some of you may remember my Gamasutra article from 2-3 years back called "What Makes a Game?" In that article, I posted this chart:

This shows my little taxonomy of forms, which I've been working on for some years now. Since 2012, I've made big progress on it, and so now my "interactive forms" page, which used to have this chart, now looks like this:

I'm sure plenty of you are itching to disagree with the new chart, and I look forward to having more of those discussions in the future. Either way, the point is, I want to keep stuff up to date as my understanding evolves and as all of you wonderful commenters point out the terrible, terrible flaws in my reasoning.

Patreon Experiment

It occurred to me that I may be able to use Patreon as a way to fund the expansion of my writing. I may also be able to expand my work into other media, such as a video series or a podcast. As an example of what kind of videos I might make, here's something I did a couple of years ago:

I'd love to be able to do more stuff like that, and I'm hoping that Patreon is something I can use to make that happen.

So far, signing up and creating a campaign has been pretty straightforward. Of course, creating content for the Patreon has been a ton of work, but having done a couple of Kickstarter campaigns, I'd say it's overall pretty similar. The site is put together quite well and interacting with it is actually probably a little bit nicer than Kickstarter overall.

Anyone know of any success stories using Patreon for this kind of a thing? I know there are probably bloggers who use it, but for writing about game design? We'll see how it goes!

If you'd like to take a look at my patreon page itself, it's here.