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Retro Achievements Announces New Patreon Tier

Warning: May Contain Satire

To see JAM’s developed sets on RA, click here. You can also follow him on YouTube.

Covered at the sole discretion of clymax for sake of transparency on Retro Achievements, which was one of the aims of Moderator BahamutVoid in leaving his farewell letter not long after Administrator televandalist’s own resignation letter dropped. If you have any concerns with this coverage, please reach out to clymax directly.

Original Link: https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/36913

July 31, 2026

That post made me facepalm a several times and my forehead even hurts a little…

This and also:

the set developers, QA team, events

I like how you put devs on the first place here while in reality you treat them and more important, their legacy like a shit.

QA team

The team crew itself should go through QA because of being incompetent idiots, as well as other teams who knows better.

I wonder what happened with other paRAsitic teams and why they were not listed here.

Like DevCompliance, Set Design team, Writing Team.

When you need money you suddenly stopped shitting on devs telling everybody that devs can do nothing without a dozen elite teams controlling them?

events

Like that the recent Wii rollout event where you either playing a good games and being rewarded by the crappy badge or playing a shitty press-X-to-win homebrews and being rewarded by the best badge?

Or like that RAD event when the host didn’t had time and efforts to fucking post the links the links to the games in this event but had time to spam every channel with stupid RAD memes to make everyone question WTF is “RAD”?

Or that DevJam event that encourage devs to mass produce shitty sterile watered down sets?

fun and interesting

And if something isn’t interesting and many people who didn’t even played the game are complaining we are removing it, regarding of the ones who actually earned an achievement.

site a safe place for everyone to be,

JESUS. FUCKING. CHRIST.

Your accessibility is locking me in a cage. ©

When you make something for everyone, you’re making it for no one.

keeping RA aligned with the original vision

Original vision is everyone who wants to be a dev is becoming dev if they are competent enough for that.

Without a dozen of paRAsitic teams doing with achievements everything they want without asking anyone.

Without Junior Obedience program, 1984 different standards and waiting for months in queue until some big daddy will come and say to change everything to his liking.

Since the servers have been paid for and we haven’t had concerns, there wasn’t a need to investigate this, until lately.

You don’t like how shitty and slow the site became? It’s your fucking problem.

Go upgrade your PC to play retro, scrub.

Be thankful for every update we are bringing to the site or else…

I’d say if your site is suffering from bots like ones from Internet Archive are harvesting the site all the time and you have to cut access for them then it certainly something wrong on your site.

Prices for hosting have increased significantly due to surging global hardware costs, RAM supply shortages and rising energy expenses.

Oh, what do you mean?

Your v2 nobody asked for is now costs a lot? Who could have thought of that?

What should we do? Right, let’s add a fucking annoying banner to every game and add more screenshots as 2 aren’t enough anymore.

Maybe it’ll help us to save the money?

Rather than adding adverts, lowering the server capabilities, adding premium paid accounts with more features

How about a basic fucking optimization?

Why your main page is over 4 megabytes?

Is there an mp3 file hidden somewhere in the code or what?

Why a huge event forum post with a lot of links and participants is taking 1 minute to load with 100% CPU usage on my machine? Like if I opened 20 livestreams in the same time.

That feels like you’re mining coins on our PCs just to open forum page and now we are even encouraged to donate you money for that?

That feels like exclusive early access option when you’re paying a $100 for a game instead of $60 to voluntarily work as a beta tester in a few days before the actual release.

To start this off, we are looking to add a new $2 Patreon Tier to allow you to be a “Super Supporter”

But we will still treat you like a shit and if anything gets wrong from your side, we’ll dispose you without a second thought but still keep you in the donaters list to make an illusion that over 1000 people are donating every month.

I’ll give you another idea. When you need money again, add a $5 tier with a ton of bells and whistles.

You know, how a unicorns are fucking on rainbow when you put your mouse cursor over that badge. Basically, a Discord’s super reactions.

Or course, everyone will pay with your own PC resources to display that shit… er… sorry, that rainbowstorm.

however if they were to charge us their currently advertised going-rate (which they could technically do at any time), in our current state we wouldn’t break even.

Earlier you were saying about a spirit of RA. Was there back in 2013 a dozen of elite teams on site and was there a thousand patrons? I doubt so. You were paying the bills and working on site. Recently you almost didn’t appeared since 2019 and now others should pay?

What if people who have the most influence on RA would come and invest their own money?

If all the mods, power team members and in general people who like to have a finger in every pie like Nepiki, suspect15, TMO, StingX2, Gollawiz, Fridge and Layton would donate $50 each, that would be up to $1000 each month.

And in areas where most of them living in a $50 is almost nothing.

Less than a modern game to buy. Less than a day of working.

If would not be complately fair at that point but at least it would make sense.

They would pay for servers, so they are setting the rules.

Currently we have “we don’t pay for servers but we’ll tell you what to do”.

RetroAchievements has always been a non-profit

Non-profit doesn’t mean you need to spend all the money you earned during a month on some stupid shit.

Have you tried saving and conserving money? Seems like not.

People who’s bad at managing community and public discussions are also bad at managing money. What a surprise!

Maybe conserving the excessive money you get every month for the future instead of sending them for something like that cringe $250 donation to GDQ? It has attracted some people, but the worst kind of people.

Offended By Everything.
Ashamed Of Nothing.
Entitled To Everything.
Contributing Nothing.

Another option. Switch all the way back to v1.

A lot of people who’s actually using the site to play and develop sets (and not just dicking around and clicking buttons) are hating your fucking Zoomer website design and now it found out your bells and whistles are also expensive as fuck.

Nothing is accessible by default and you need to double-triple click everywhere to reveal the needed information or open a new window to get the needed data. You needed to be logged in to get most of the data.

Your designers know nothing about the Golden Ratio, palette blends and basic user comfort.

You have no idea how annoying and frustrating it is now to use the site from using search to get exact time and date of some event like a forum post or an achievement unlock.

Of course, “10 years ago” will say more than “1 Aug 2016 12:34”.

A fun yet sad fact. A site related to retrogaming is infested by a modern trends.

A basic PC setup to play retro games now isn’t enough to browse your site without slowdowns and having pain in the eyes because of your micro fonts and “gray on gray” design choices.

You know, when you’re touching retro games, you usually don’t need to upgrade your PC as they were made years ago and system requirements are pretty low but seems like RA is living in another dimension.

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Comments

One response to “Retro Achievements Announces New Patreon Tier”

  1. Nunya Bizness Avatar
    Nunya Bizness

    It’s nice to see this getting said. Maybe we can also address their dismissal of harassment situations. Maybe we should discuss certain staff by name and give examples and screenshots of it.

    “He was just being friendly.” Doxxing 18 year olds because they were silly and used their real picture as an avatar because you never successfully conversed with the opposite sex is one them. A one month ban from devving and then a friendly welcome back is the same as condoning as it was nothing but public relations.

    Being overstimulated by members with autism and allowing those members to be bullied was also common. All under the guise of silencing them for the ease of the masses.

    Entry level low hanging fruit politics.

    Removing silly games for adult content. They are “moral” enough to remove Custer’s Revenge, but they support a game literally called “He fucked the girl out of me” which contains segments where you are raped and deal with rape trauma. Apparently it’s more important to pander to the better known demographic than the 3-5 real women on the site who may or may not have dealt with such things.

    There was a time when I was a bit of an insider on RA, and this is all sadly accurate, especially now. If you are a staff member and get absolutely ANY kind of validation by being an authority figure on RA, please seek a good therapist and try breathing oxygen.

    The social bias and favoritism is strong on RA. They need to grow up and get over themselves, I think we will all see that RA is not long term sustainable when they don’t even know how to optimize for bandwidth.

    When a couple of staff members had crushes on a couple of female users they were exempt from things such as verifying on Discord, being penalized for really anything, and the whole thing was just one big high school cafeteria. Those two female users were doxxed by Thoreou and Muskin. (Screenshots exist and are out there). One ex staff member drove one of them to illness and was beyond obsessed. But they were all “just being friendly” according to one of the best known staff members at the time.

    It’s always been a toxic community despite a few good people here and there who are now mostly gone. Stay AWAY from RA, or at least only use it’s functions and never join their community. If you are a woman, keep it on the DL. There are plenty of guys with loli avatars to cover that.

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