Welcome to the Rogue Discord - weird timing, we know

Hey gang, we have some big and pretty exciting announcements coming next week ahead of our 6 month (!!!) anniversary. We've learned a ton writing for you, and we've got some pretty great ideas on where we want to take the site going forward.

We'll have more information for you next week – spoilers: we love introducing you to old and new games that we think you'll enjoy spending your precious time on – but really, we're looking to do two major things with the changes we're making:

1. Provide a better value for the folks out there willing to support us financially
2. Make it more appealing to subscribe without locking our free readers out of the content they've been enjoying for the last six months

We have some pretty fun ideas for both of those points, all of which are additive to what we're doing now. But we wanted to kick off the announcements a little early with one of our big new subscriber features: our Discord.

It's out today, and we hope you'll use it to help us make this Steam Next Fest week even better.

So what's the deal with this Discord?

"Wow, another subscriber-only Discord channel for me to jump into." We know. We've wanted to get this up and running since launch, but we wanted to focus on learning about the site, ourselves, and you first!

So why now? Well, events like Steam Next Fest are so much more powerful with a community, and that's happening the week we're launching this Discord.

If you're already a paid subscriber, you can jump in to give recommendations to each other (check your email), and give us recommendations in our short-lived "Steam Next Fest" chat. And if we play a demo you recommended and write about it on the site, we'll credit you in the article!

When we reveal some of the new programming next week, you'll see some other fun things we plan to use the Discord for – like the currently-mysterious "voting" channel. We want you to help shape our content more directly, and the Discord is a place you'll be able to do that.

We also recognize that the world is pretty bad right now, and we're not really sure when that will stop. But we've built a pretty cool community on BlueSky so far, and we hope that you'll find people in our community that you can chat with, play games with, and discuss life's great and terrible mysteries with. We'll be in there too, and we're excited to be more present with the community in a time where all of us need that kind of connection.

To get into the Discord, all you need to do is become a paid subscriber at any tier. We'll be starting a two week sale for annual subscriptions today for all tiers to celebrate. You can read a little more about that in our special sales article, but here are the new prices for the next two weeks!

• Roguelite - Support us, connect with us, and experience all we have to offer for $60 ($10 off)
• Mini-Boss - Help shape and personalize our content for $85 ($15 off)
• Big Boss - Sponsor Rogue's ongoing commitment to games journalism for $499 (50% off). Only real Diamond Dogs need apply

So, wait, isn't Discord bad?

One thing we really try our best at here at Rogue is to be as transparent as possible. When we can't afford to pay as much for our freelance as we'd like, we'd rather just tell you that than lead you on. We try to be as ethical and worker-focused as we can.

Which leads to the obvious question: isn't Discord bad?

Yeah! Sure seems like it.

Like all game-adjacent companies, since Discord has tasted the gold that was the pandemic, they've looked for every opportunity to enshittify themselves. And they're really going for it with their new ID verification push. We don't like it, and we recommend you simply not engage with it (although it appears like Discord is walking that experiment back, as expected).

But there's a reason why all of our excellent media peers also use Discord: it's where we're all at right now. We could make a TeamSpeak (what year is it?) or try to jump to some other platform, but nobody has decided who will replace Discord in the great friend platform wars. We believe that any community built on a different platform would not allow us to reach our primary goal of reaching you all and allowing you to reach us.

So, here is our plan. We're going to start on Discord today – we have a nice server already setup, ready for your suggestions and recommendations. But we're also looking to see where the wind is blowing when it comes to alternatives. Once people settle on a new community site, we'll migrate over there together (with no cost to you, of course), build something new, and share it with our subscribers just like we are today. Then we'll slowly start to phase out the Discord for any stragglers.

That's what makes sense to us right now. But, like always, we'll be very transparent as we make any potential moves to somewhere new, and ask you, our Discord users, what sounds best.

If all of this sounds like a fun time, please consider subscribing. If you do, the bottom half of this article will unlock and you'll be able to get into the Discord right away.

If you already subscribe to us, just click the link below (or the one in your email) and you'll get right in.

Thank you for all of your support over the past 6 months, and we're really excited to tell you more next week.

Tell your friends, share us around, and see you in Discord!