Subscription Goals

We’re so back. A newish year and the triumphant return of Inside Baseball Week can only mean one thing: a refreshed list of subscriber goals. Let’s get to it.If you’re visiting Aftermath for the first time, welcome! Aftermath is a worker-owned, reader-supported site about games, the internet, and everything that comes after. We hope you stick around. If you’ve been around for a minute, you’re probably well aware that we’re an entirely reader-funded operation. Still, we must continually bang that drum because subscriptions really and truly do keep us alive. The upside of all this is that we’re not beholden to any execs, investors, or other companies. As a result, we can publish whatever we see fit.In the past year alone, our loyal reader base has allowed us to write about game devs being forced to leave the industry as a result of rampant layoffs; the quiet, often undignified labor of freelance games journalists; how they don’t make anime like they used to; the many different ways generative AI is being unsuccessfully shoehorned into everything; Twitch CEO Dan Clancy’s effort to get everybody to like him (and how it ultimately failed); the conspiracy theory that gave rise to gaming’s modern far-right grifter-verse; the plight of leftist influencers following Trump’s election victory; how the myth of the star reporter is reshaping journalism; Xbox’s rot economy; why everybody should make their own website to stop the internet from sucking; why it’s futile to fight racism with logic; Elon Musk’s embarrassing gaming setup; Taiwanese arcade cabinet renovation projects; hacked espresso machines; cleaning products; popcorn toppings; and Sanrio’s truly bonkers quest to become the next Disney. We’ve also counted Gokus and interviewed a dog (twice).Last year, we kicked off our first subscriber drive, pairing longer-term goals with subscriber totals we estimated would allow us to realize our wildest (and more realistic) dreams. We want readers to understand where their money is going, and so far, it’s proven to be a winning formula. As of when this post was originally written, we were at 4,350 paying subscribers, up from 2,850 this time last year (UPDATE: Now we have even [Conteúdo truncado para controle de custo.]