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Welcome to our 2nd annual financial breakdown—where we show you exactly where every dollar goes at ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories. ROMchip is entirely reader-supported. We don’t run ads, charge article fees, or rely on institutional subsidies. Instead, we raise our budget each year through our fundraiser, then spend or allocate down to zero by investing in labor, publishing infrastructure, public programming, and future improvements. Last year’s budget (2025): $9,388.43. This total reflects donations made to ROMchip, after subtracting our fiscal sponsor’s 7% fee.  Where the Money Went: $9,388.43
People Power As always, a significant portion of our budget went directly to paying people: freelance editors, web developers, writers, and technical specialists. This past year, an astounding $8,525.02 was earmarked for these individuals. This includes: our copyeditor Mary, who works across each issue; Jeff, our new web developer; and Cody and Consort, who provide backend support and technical infrastructure for ROMchip’s streaming events. This total also includes freelance writers subsidized through the Freelancer Fund. That means 91% of money raised went directly into the pockets of freelancers and self-employed individuals. We’re proud to invest in the labor that makes game history accessible. Expense Breakdown Copyediting – $2,937.50 Our largest single expense in 2025 was professional copyediting. We paid Mary a total of $2,937.50 across two invoice cycles, covering both issues of ROMchip released this year. Mary reviews every published article through two rounds of edits and ensures our writing is clear, clean, and consistent with house style. Website Fund (for future upgrades) – $2,161.92 In 2025 we allocated $2,161.92 into a dedicated Website Fund. This allows us to contribute money to these funds year over year, helping us afford the sometimes larger costs associated with web development. If you read last year’s report, you may recall that we were using a web host/service provider called openjou openjournalsystems.com. OJS.com tried to take us to the cleaners last year, doubling their hosting fees for the 3rd year in a row (from $2K to $4K). They were insisting our custom build made maintenance too labor intensive. Communication and professionalism broke down in our correspondence, and we hustled to find an alternative rather than drop nearly 50% of our budget on just web hosting, without any additional upgrades or support. I reached out to contacts in the NYC tech scene, and was introduced to Jeff. We shifted money from other funds into the website fund, so we could not only pay Jeff to migrate our site for us, but to pay for other improvements as well. Over the course of 2025, Jeff build custom tooling to speed up our XML publishing workflow. It’s dropped the amount of time it takes to prepare a Word doc for publication from 1+ hour to about 15 minutes. We love this for us, and consider it a worthwhile expense. Ongoing Website Maintenance – $1,500.00 Jeff now handles our web maintenance on a quarterly schedule, $500 per (since we hired him mid-spring, he only did 3 quarters of maintenance last year). This work includes software updates, backend tweaks, and regular bug fixes. Freelance Tech Support – $775.60 We paid Cody and Consort $387.80 each for their ongoing technical support of ROMchip’s public programming. Both are returning collaborators who run our Twitch streams, manage OBS configurations, and keep everything looking sharp and running smoothly during live broadcasts. Their work is essential to the success of ROMchip Presents and our annual Twitch fundraiser, and we’re grateful to continue working with them. Freelancer Fund (deposit) – $1,150.00 We deposited $1,150 into our Freelancer Fund: a special internal fund we use to commission work from non-academic writers, translators, artists, or researchers. No payments were made from this fund in 2025, but we have two works currently in development for 2026. Funds are drawn from this pool to pay contributors whose work wouldn’t otherwise be institutionally supported, ensuring ROMchip stays open to independent voices. Fundraiser Gifts & Swag – $319.08 We spent $319.08 on custom swag, postage, and packaging to send thank-you gifts to early donors and top-tier fundraiser supporters. This included thank you cards, high-quality logo stickers, commemorative plaques for Patrons, and all related mailing supplies. All items were mailed directly by the editorial team. These small gestures go a long way in building and maintaining the community that sustains us. Business Services – $242.67 This covers several line-item expenses required to operate ROMchip as a registered business: everything from our domain name to our registered agent to our business mailbox to our state mandated biennial statement fee. We were able to reduce about $180 in costs by switching to a cheaper registered agent in Albany (rather than using Legal Zoom). Discretionary Fund – $301.66 We added $301.66 to our flexible cushion of discretionary funds—used for unplanned needs or saved for new opportunities. This years discretionary fund contribution is low because we allocated a greater amount of money to our website fund. Thank You Your donations power every article, every livestream, every editorial back-and-forth—and we hope this transparency helps show just how far your support goes. Thank you for believing in ROMchip. We’ll see you in the next issue 💸
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We’re excited to announce the official launch of the ROMchip Freelancer Fund, a new initiative to support independent writers, citizen historians, and game preservationists who want to publish original work with us.
ROMchip is committed to expanding who gets to write game history—not just academic professionals, but also the many brilliant people doing the work from outside traditional institutions. The Freelancer Fund helps make that possible by paying contributors for pieces published in our Interviews, Materials, and Translations sections. This year’s fund will operate on a rolling basis. Writers can pitch us any time, and we’ll support as many pieces as our budget allows. Once funds are tapped for 2025, we’ll note it on our site. Full details here: Interested in pitching? We’re accepting work that:
Thanks to everyone who supported our fundraising efforts and helped make this possible. We can’t wait to see what you bring us. Game on, Laine and the ROMchip Editorial Group (Soraya, Henry, Dave, and Logan) This post is just a friendly little write-up about everything we accomplished in 2024 (so we don't have to repeat it in our fundraising emails!). Buckle up, cause since last year's fundraiser, we've:
As part of our 2025 fundraising campaign, we're launching a new initiative to better expedite and support the work of freelancers who want to make contributions to game history by publishing in ROMchip. We’re calling this the Freelancer Fund.
The Freelancer Fund is a pool of money we can fundraise for annually, for the purpose of paying freelancers to publish in ROMchip; pitches will be reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis, and payments aim to match or slightly exceed market rate. This post will explain what the Freelancer Fund is, how it relates to past initiatives, and how we see it growing ROMchip’s potential. The purpose of this post is to explain to our donors and readers, new and long-standing alike, why we’re moving in this direction. If you're a journalist interested in pitching to us, check back here or see if there’s an updated post on our blog. We’ll be opening up the fund shortly after the conclusion of our 2025 fundraiser in late February. Why are We Doing This (aka What’s the Backstory Here)? Part of understanding why ROMchip would introduce something like this requires first understanding the economics of academic journals (you can skip this paragraph if you’re in academia!). See, academic journals basically never pay people to write for them. This is normal in academia, because publishing research is considered part of what your university job is paying you to do, and is how you obtain other forms of social and economic capital, such as tenure. It’s also the case that academic journals don't pull a wide enough mainstream readership to be able to generate advertising revenue (which is how traditional publishing makes money). There's benefits to this model: such scholarship doesn't have to please markets, engage in clickbait, or cater to the SEO gods. There's plenty that's problematic about this system, but these are the profession's conventions. But ROMchip strives to be an inclusive publishing venue—not just in our content, but also who is able to publish here. Because professional journalists and freelancers operate within a different industry economy than academics, it isn’t appropriate for us to ask them to write for free. So if we want freelance journalists to be able to participate here, we have to figure out a way to compensate them. Last year we attempted to address this by setting our fundraising tiers to reflect specific dollar amounts that we could use to fund two commissions: a Materials piece (our version of a non-academic “long read”) and a Translation. We set the commission at $1000 for each of these works. We wanted these commissions to feel like “big wins” for authors, with the prestigious dollar amount attached. The issue with doing commissions was twofold. First, because we really only had one writing gig to offer (the Materials piece) we inadvertently wound up basically running a contest, which was time-consuming and labor-intensive. We received over 50 submissions, perhaps two dozen of which were high-quality. Many others were simply not a fit in terms of scope or focus, or had been clearly produced by gen AI. Nonetheless, we still had to file and review all the submissions, send confirmation, acceptance, and rejection notifications, etc. It all wound up being a significant amount of unexpected labor during the summer. The second issue is that it simply limited the number of pieces that we could support. We received some very cool submissions, and were dismayed by the idea of only being able to go forward with one a year. As for Translations, these pose a different set of constraints--translation work is a very specific skill set, and requires extensive domain mastery. We lucked out in that one of the submissions to the open call commission also involved translation work, but in future years we can see it being a struggle to guarantee an annual translation commission. So How Does the Freelancer Fund Fix These Issues? The Freelancer Fund allows us to support multiple authors on an annual rolling basis. It is essentially an open pot of first-come/first-serve money all for anyone who can successfully pitch us work. We’re not as concerned as we were last year about making sure journalists “know” that they can pitch to us. Our name and brand recognition are steadily growing; we’ve increasingly had independent journalists cold pitch us for opportunities; and we can even start by reaching out to folks who submitted to the commissions last year. We have a lot of trust in word of mouth and the snowball effect to make sure folks know that we’re funding work. This also means pitches will more likely come in spread out across the year, rather than all at once. We'll be able to say “yes” to more work, but also – – when the Freelancer Fund money has run out for the year, that’s it. We can direct folks to get in touch with us in the following year, and otherwise there isn’t much communication overhead required to manage the process. So Does This Mean You’re Paying Writers Less? Yes--but there is a solid rationale here. Last year’s commissions were set at levels that were more like prizes than standard payment rates. A $1000 writing payment isn’t common in the world of freelance journalism, except for prestigious journalists or within prestigious outlets. We always want to be paying people more, but we also want to be paying more people. We think the conventions of the Freelancer Fund will help us get more people’s work out there while still compensating writers fairly. Our goal is to set rates that match or exceed standard market rate, ranging from $350 to $700 depending on length, difficulty, or the specific type of writing undertaken. We’re still figuring all this out, but you could expect interviews and short translations to be at the lower end of the scale, and longform, archivally-driven Materials pieces, or long/complex Translations, to be on the higher end. We’ve based these numbers on what some freelance games writers have shared with us, but we’re really happy to hear from others what their experience of “market rate” reflects. So How Will This Work? Basically, the more money we raise during our fundraiser, the more we can put toward paying authors. Since our base operating expenses are pretty stable, most of what we earn over $7K will contribute directly to this fund. We’ll launch it shortly after our February fundraiser, and we might even be able to see work supported by it as our December 2025 issue. Will do a separate post letting folks know how to reach out to us, and what kinds of projects were accepting—but it should be along the lines of Interviews, Materials pieces, and Translations. That’s what we’ve got right now! If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments. Game on, Laine and the ROMchip Editorial Group (Soraya, Henry, Dave, and Logan) Hello and welcome to the very first ROMchip financial report! At ROMchip, we like our practices to extend from our politics. You probably already know that accessibility and transparency is a big deal for us: we don’t have any kind of paywall or advertising, we don’t charge authors to publish with us, and authors keep the copyright on their work. But now that we are taking funds for our fans and readers, we also want to be a transparent Journal. Hence this post, which is going to explain exactly where that money goes. Because when you donate to us, we want you to know that we put that money to good use. We also hope this level of transparency will be informative for other folks out there running, or considering running, various editorial projects. Please note -- some of this is money actually spent, some of it is earmarked for specific spending (and therefore still in our account); regardless, it all amounts how the 2024 funds are being used. So let’s get to it. The Big PictureIn 2024, ROMchip raised $10,073.97 in donations; of that, all but $30 was subject to a 7% cut from our fiscal sponsor, Hack Club (that remaining $30 was a rollover from our prior fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas). Thus, we had $9,370.90 to put toward our expenses in 2024. Here’s how those expenses broke down, which is also visualized in the chart below: Copyediting: $2,438.70 Writer/Translator Commissions: $2,075 Fundraising: Tech Support: $660.00 ROMchip Presents Tech Costs: $420 Fundraising: Donor Swag: $298.13 ROMchip LLC Setup Costs: $2,027.84 Website Upgrade Fund: $750 Business Services: $451.17 Discretionary Fund: $250.06  People PowerBefore we get into the nitty-gritty of each of these categories, I want to highlight one quick fact that we’re extremely proud of: nearly 60% of our budget went to paying *people*. Costs related to copyediting, writer and translator commissions, our fundraising tech support, and the “ROMchip Presents” Tech costs are all direct payments to individuals. We’re extremely proud that so much of our fundraising dollars are going directly into the pockets of hard-working creatives and freelance tech specialists.  Expense BreakdownWe’ve done my best, below, to explain each expense category, what determines it, and whatever context we think is necessary to help understand what it’s for. Some of this gets very specific, so feel free to go as deep or as surface as your inner fiscal nerd desires.
Copyediting Copyediting is our single largest expense (26% of our budget), and with good reason: our copy editor is the reason everything is so readable and well organized! 😊 Her name is Mary, and she’s great to work with. All copy at ROMchip goes through two passes of copyediting, which includes review by the authors and a member of the editorial group. We are invoiced on an hourly rate for each issue. Writer/Translator Commissions One of our fundraising commitments last year was that if we could raise an additional $2000, we would commission a new translation and a new materials piece at $1000 a pop. We held an open call for the Materials piece commission, and were lucky enough that one of those submissions had a translation angle to it (so we were able to kill two birds with one stone). Both pieces are in process. The Materials commission went to Henrique Sampiao (producer of the Brazilian game history podcast Primeiro Contato), for a piece about the 1990s Brazilian game Casseta & Planeta: Noite Animal. Our translation commission went to Heidi Kemps and Brian Clark, who are producing an edited translation of Hiromasa Iwasaki’s doujinshi LEGEND #7: Why do 2D Games Usually Go to the Right?. We expect both will be published in the July 2025 issue. Fundraising: Tech Support These costs reflect a percentage-based commission earned by Cody, our tech producer, and Conway, our talent coordinator, based on the money raised during our live 12-hour fundraiser. Cody and Conway brought tremendous technical expertise, managed channel feeds, did live A/V adjustment, designed animated graphics, and did test runs and troubleshooting with all talent prior to the fundraiser stream. The percentage rate reflects a heavy discount for their services, which they offer as their own way to support ROMchip’s mission (thank you Cody and Conway 😭💐😭!!) ROMchip Presents Tech Costs This is a flat fee paid to Cody and Conway to handle the labor associated with hosting five free game history research talks on ROMchip’s Twitch channel. Three happen as part of our ramp-up to the single day fundraiser, and two others were spread out across the year. These talks are a way for us to showcase game history research with a broad public audience. Recordings of most talks are available on our YouTube channel. Fundraising: Donor Swag These costs were associated with producing and shipping promised gifts for our early donors, as well as some special awards for a few very generous individual donations. This included the gifts themselves (laptop stickers and little 3D printed plaques), as well as cards, envelopes, and shipping to about two dozen donors. ROMchip LLC Setup Costs This is a unique, one-time only line item that reimbursed money spent in 2023 to file ROMchip as an LLC in New York state. This was undertaken as part of the journal’s transition from being university-supported to being reader-supported through a fiscal sponsor. This provides some liability separation between the journal itself and the member of the editorial board that holds ownership of the LLC (Laine), keeps their taxes a little cleaner, and gives the ROMchip journal some actual economic and legally verified existence. I (Laine) paid for these expenses out of pocket. Since I had no prior experience doing this, I’m sure I wasn’t quite as cost-effective as I could’ve been, but nearly half of this cost is attributed to the significant (and legally-required) expense of running a print business notice in 2 NYC newspapers. Most of the remaining cost was attributed to LegalZoom, our first one-year subscription to a virtual business address, and a notary fee. In the future, this line item will be used to pay for our publishing platform hosting and support provider, openjournalsystems.com (not to be confused with Open Journal Systems, which is the platform itself! More on that below). Since those costs for our publishing platform host were billed before last year’s fundraiser (i.e. we were technically broke), they were generously comped to an Editorial Group member’s research funds as a one-time lift, rather than being paid by the journal. Website Upgrade Fund This is money we set aside out of the fundraiser to pay for an eventual website upgrade. In future reports, you’ll probably learn more about Open Journal Systems [OJS], which is basically the academic industry standard for running an online peer-reviewed journal (or as they describe it on their website, “the most widely used researcher-to-reader software to run scholarly journals and publish research articles”). But here's the thing: the out-of-the-box OJS installation is, to put it bluntly, pretty ugly. Under-designed and confusing to navigate. Since we wanted our website to be a little more stylish, we hired a web developer to do some custom front-end coding, to give it more of an online “magazine” feel (we are apparently one of the only journals, out of hundreds of publications running on OJS, that uses a custom front-end design). Because the OJS programming backend is complicated, we have to hire outside help anytime we want to do a website refresh. Additionally, we never quite figured out a good way to do publication layout; we transitioned web developers about two-thirds of the way through the project, and got left with a system that frankly has a lot of duct tape on it. Our current process for preparing copy for online publication is labor-intensive and tedious. And the journal site has limitations we want to improve -- for example, we currently can’t host video or do block quotes. These are solvable problems, but we have to pay someone to solve them for us. This fund is basically a line item for storing that money, year-over-year, until we feel we have enough to make getting a quote worthwhile (we're looking to save up several thousand dollars for trying to improve the website). Business Services Business services include the cost of a registered agent, our virtual office business address, and our domain name. These costs should hopefully come down significantly next year, as I’ve found a much cheaper local option for registered agents than LegalZoom. Discretionary Fund The discretionary fund reflects money not currently earmarked for other expenses. We can use this money to cover unexpected costs (bills, filings, charges we didn’t see coming or expenses that were more than we thought they’d be). We could also use that money to host more Twitch talks or offset travel costs for an Editorial Group member to go to a conference and solicit copy. It might become the basis for a future scholarship or grant fund that helps pay grad students to travel to archives. Who knows! We just think it’s good to have a little extra cash on hand for a rainy day 😊 Thus concludes our first ever financial report! We hope you found it insightful. Feel free to leave any comments or questions below. Game On, Laine, Dave, Henry, Soraya and Logan |
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ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories is fiscally sponsored by The Hack Foundation (d.b.a. Hack Club), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN: 81-2908499).
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