Announcing the ROMchip Freelancer Fund

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)