ICXM, when it launched back in 2014 as XboxMAD, was created for one purpose: to proudly represent the Xbox One during its hard times. Since then, we’ve grown a lot. Over three million people have read content from our site. Our writers, all volunteers, all fans of Xbox and overall fans of video games as a whole have worked hard to produce news, previews, reviews, interviews and all manner of content for our readers to consume and hopefully enjoy.
ICXM will hopefully be around for a long time. We love our work and we love our readers but we can’t keep writing on our own. Servers cost money, sometimes the games cost money, the hardware most definitely costs money. The site as it is now does not bring in the income that many of you online might think with that all-important ad revenue being much lower than even we expected when we started off.
Many of us here have jobs, or are studying at college or university. We are all here for you but the site cannot stand on its own. We need you, our loyal readers to help us however you can. Today, the ICXM Team proudly announces its Patreon, a way that you, if you wish, to donate money on a monthly basis to help keep the servers on and help us here at ICXM reach the great heights that we all dream of at night.
We’ve had plans for ICXM for a while that we would require funding to complete. Plans for a new site, paid employees, the removal of advertisements to make the reader’s experience nicer, more giveaways and overall the ability to dedicate more time to the site have all been dreams in the heads of the ICXM Team for as long as we can remember.
As I’m sure you’ve heard from your favourite musicians, artists, journalists or game developers on Patreon, every dollar counts and your contribution would mean the world to us. Rewards range from taking part in ICXM livestreams to playing with the team—and probably annihilate us at any multiplayer game we attempt to face you at, be able to send us your questions to ask in professional interviews with developers to find out the answers you want to know and get early access to the ICXM MADCast which we plan to bring back soon.
If you wish to donate anything to the team, please follow this link here to do so. We thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for the support you’ve given us over the years and we hope that 2017 is a strong year for video games, a strong year for us and a strong year for you too.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.