Somehow, it is already time for another one of these. If you’ve been with us for a bit, you’ll remember that we’ve aimed to obliterate each year by spelling out our subscriber goals in excruciating detail, and 2026 is no different. This already-horrible year has to die, and you’re gonna help us kill 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 (for the moment) an entirely reader-funded operation. So, 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, our readers—to whom we are eternally grateful—have allowed us to write about the struggles faced by laid-off game developers trying to find new work in a rapidly contracting industry, how unions are trying to help, the grim realities of major events like GDC and Summer Game Fest in a country being assailed by its own government, how an organization fronted by some of the biggest streamers in the world fell apart, what it means to work in games media during a BDS blackout of Microsoft, how to buy a Nintendo Switch 2 entirely with Citi Bike points, a secretive company that’s filled beloved video game websites with AI and gambling, what happened after a Ghost of Yotei developer was fired for making a joke about Charlie Kirk, why controversial banned art game Horses is actually tame, how AI is making it hard to tell if a journalist is real, what happened when a beloved member of the fighting game community was taken by ICE, how unconventional publishers are trying to unfuck the video game industry, how to read Moby Dick in a day, how the Mayor’s Office has been quietly supporting NYC’s video game scene for years, why Chainsaw Man is better than the Bible, how the left doesn’t hate technology (but does hate being exploited), and what the Epstein files reveal about how powerful people see video games. We also eulogized a goldfish and a horse, both of whom were improbably related to video games.
Perhaps even more significantly, subscribers have allowed us to bring on four part-timers: Isaiah Colbert and Nicole Carpenter as regular contributors, and recently, Ash Parrish as a contributor and Joshua Rivera as a monthly columnist. They’ve all made Aftermath an immensely more vibrant and interesting place to both work at and read; we couldn’t imagine the site without them. Reader support also allowed us to relaunch the website entirely, giving us a new backend provided by Ghost and Outpost, and a shiny new home page that we still think is just swell. More so than ever, Aftermath is a real business now, as opposed to an awkward tangle of writers trying to pilot a single trench coat like it’s Voltron.
When we first started running these subscriber drives in 2024, we had only a couple thousand paying subscribers. Now we’re up to 5,130 as of this writing, with an additional 23,000 free members waiting in the wings for their moment to start giving us money (your time could be now!). As is tradition, it’s now time for us to share with you our wildest ambitions. Here’s what we’ve got cooking, should we reach specific subscriber thresholds:
5,130 - Where we're at now.
5,250 - A third, somehow even bigger mug.
5,500 - You Are Error (finally) returns.
5,800 - We can travel to and cover events more regularly.
6,000 - We’ll launch an annual Aftermath zine that bundles together our favorite stories of the year in physical form.
6,150 - A second party, and we can cover Luke’s travel expenses (though given the current state of America, we doubt he’ll want to attend).
6,300 - One of us will read a horrible video game book of readers’ choosing and write a book report about it.
6,500 - We can bring on people in a part-time capacity to help us with more specialized tasks (a video person, a dedicated businessperson, someone to focus on our social media accounts and promotion, etc).
7,000 - We can hire a new full-time staff member!
8,000 - A third party, in Australia (we’re already training to fend off the magpies).
10,000 - A lucky reader gets to meet one of our cats.
??? - We can rent some sort of office space and work together in-person if we so choose (hijinks will ensue).
99,999 - Inside Baseball Year.
100,000 - Though G/O Media no longer exists, we will nonetheless purchase the biggest, nicest cannon we can find and fire somebody whose name rhymes with Spim Janfeller out of it.
150,000 - We’ll force the owners of Polymarket and Kalshi to duke it out in the UFC Octagon.
200,000 - Woke Century.
300,000 - We’ll dedicate our lives to buying every horrible jacket Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang covets before he can.
As with years prior, we plan to regularly update this page—and let everybody know when we do so—to ensure that readers can follow along at home. We also reserve the right to move tiers around a little should budgetary constraints reveal themselves over time (running a business is hard, lol). If you’d like to kick things off by subscribing or going up a subscription tier (which will grant you access to our Discord, as well as a merch discount), you can do so here. Or if you’d like to supercharge this whole operation, we also have a tips jar where you can donate whatever you want (RICH PEOPLE PLEASE NOTICE THIS).
Thank you! With your support, we can reduce another year to rubble and heal a wounded nation with the power of blogs.
This week on Aftermath, we’re celebrating Woke 2. What does that mean? Pieces that dig into the origins of woke—not the empty, sanitized version peddled by companies, but actual culture created by people—as well as communities that are already charting a course to a bolder, better future where we can all just be chill to one another.
