Roguelike Celebration 2025 - Supporting the Conference
We’re happy to see submissions for presentations at this year’s Roguelike Celebration rolling in and encourage folks to keep them coming - but in this email we’d like to take a moment to talk about the less fun aspects of running a conference, and other ways you can offer your support.
🗳️ Now accepting direct donations 🗳️
In the past we’ve talked about how sponsorship helps us stay sustainable in paying our speakers, as well as covering our yearly art commission and live transcription. As a small conference, just one or two sponsors was always enough to comfortably cover our operating costs. But in the past few years as finances get tighter all around, we’ve struggled to find any companies with the means to sponsor us, depleting our financial reserves.
On the upside, at the same time we’ve heard people say that while their employer may not be open to sponsorship, they’d like to support Roguelike Celebration on a personal level. To that end, we’ve now set up a direct donation link that can be found here!
We are fiscally sponsored by Independent Arts & Media, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and so all donations go directly towards keeping this conference running. We know that money is tight for everyone right now and so are committed to keeping a ‘pay what you can’ option in our tickets, but we deeply appreciate anyone who is able to support us as we keep this labour of love going.
📉 Fiscal realities - losing live captioning 📉
We believe in being transparent about what goes into running this conference, but typically don’t get into all the details of what’s going on behind the scenes unless someone is interested in learning more or wanting to organize a similar event. This year, however, our situation has a more direct impact on the conference experience and we want to be upfront about it now, in advance of the event itself.
Our expenses to run the conference remain quite constant (and were reduced when we made the cost-saving decision to switch to print-on-demand services for merch last year), but without sponsorship and with money raised from ticket sales trending downward since 2020, our current reserves would not be able to cover the full cost of a typical Roguelike Celebration.
What that means is that we will have to drop our live captioning this year, which at roughly $5000 USD is our single biggest expense. Our captioner Maggie has been with us since we were in-person and has developed an impressive dictionary of roguelike terminology to keep up with even our fastest speakers, making her well worth the cost whenever we’ve been able to afford her services, and we’re thankful for the hard work she’s put in every year for the conference.
If we can raise the funds to cover the cost we will be very glad to ask Maggie back, this year or in future years, but we wanted to be open about the unfortunate reality that as it stands we will be missing our live captioning services this year.
📯Spreading the word 📯
The enthusiasm and support of the Roguelike Celebration community is what gives us the energy to work as an organizing team and put this conference together each year, and we’re thankful for the continued energy that fills the social space with joy each year. We’ll do everything we can to keep that community going for as long as the interest is there - and one of the simplest ways you can help the conference is to simply spread the word about its existence!
While we especially appreciate getting the word out to potential speakers and sponsors, we also love anyone inviting new people to take part in Roguelike Celebration as an attendee! Even after ten years of running we often hear from people who are deeply interested in what we talk about here, yet have never heard of us before. So please keep telling your friends, your coworkers, your peers, your lab-grown army of carnivorous slimes… it’s all very appreciated!
Thank you for your support,