A small, stubborn publication about fantasy worlds.
We started PixelStronghold because we missed the kind of fantasy-game writing we grew up reading — long, considered, and a little weird. This is who's behind the site, what we believe, and how we pay the bills.
How we got here
PixelStronghold began in spring 2019 as a Friday email newsletter sent to about 200 friends. Four of us had recently left jobs at larger gaming outlets — not in any dramatic way, just one by one — and we wanted somewhere to publish the kind of reviews our editors had quietly told us "didn't fit the audience". The first issue was a 4,200-word review of a six-year-old fantasy strategy game. People read it. The second issue went out the next week. By the end of 2019 the list was 4,000 readers and we registered the domain.
The model has barely changed since. A Friday newsletter. A small archive of long reviews. A few essays a month. We've added staff, but we've also turned down most of the things you're supposed to add when a gaming site grows — a YouTube channel, a deals section, sponsored content, a Discord server with thousands of members. They're not bad things. They just aren't this thing.
Our mission
Fantasy and RPG criticism in the late 2010s and early 2020s ran into a structural problem: the economics of writing about games rewarded speed and scale, but the games themselves got bigger and slower. A 100-hour RPG cannot be reviewed in two days. A live-service fantasy MMO cannot be reviewed at launch at all. Most outlets adapted by lowering the bar — quicker takes, scored verdicts, embargo races. We think a smaller, slower outlet can do something the big ones structurally can't.
Concretely, that means:
- We finish games before we review them. All of them. Even the long ones. If we can't finish a game (because it's a service, or because the time required is unreasonable), we publish an "impressions" piece and label it that way.
- We revisit games one year later. Our 12-month re-reviews are some of our most-read pieces. Most launch-week verdicts are wrong about something; we want to be on the record about which.
- We don't score on a numeric scale. The scores you see on the homepage are our writers' personal recommendations, attached to the writer, never an editorial verdict. Anyone who has worked in this industry knows that a 7 versus an 8 is mostly about traffic, not games.
- We disclose everything. Review codes, travel, hardware loans, prior relationships with developers. Every piece carries its own disclosure block.
Editorial ethics
We have an ethics policy. It's boring, which is the point. The main rules:
- No writer reviews a game made by a studio they have a personal connection to, full stop.
- No sponsored editorial content. Ever. We've turned down enough of these to fund a small newsletter for a year if we'd taken them. Sponsorships, if they happen, live in the newsletter footer, are clearly marked, and never influence coverage.
- Review codes are gifts, not contracts. We will publish negative reviews of games we received free codes for. We have. We will again.
- We correct errors publicly, with a dated note at the bottom of the article. We don't silently edit.
- We pay our freelancers above the industry rate, on publication, with a flat fee and not per-word.
"We'd rather be the second outlet to cover a story and be right, than the first to cover it and wrong. We have been wrong, and we have left those errors visible." — From the staff handbook, written 2021
How we make money
Roughly 70% of PixelStronghold's revenue comes from paid newsletter subscriptions ($6 a month, $60 a year, the wall is loose — anyone who emails us and says they can't afford it gets a comp). About 20% comes from a small number of hand-picked sponsorships in the Friday newsletter — companies whose products we'd recommend anyway, never game publishers. The remaining 10% is one-off support from readers who want to drop us a tip after a particular piece.
We don't run programmatic ads, we don't have affiliate links inside articles, and we don't operate any commerce arm. The site is deliberately cheap to run, and we keep the team small for the same reason.
What's next
Honestly: more of the same. We have ideas for a print annual, a small podcast about preservation, and possibly a residency where we'd bring in one outside critic for a month at a time to write whatever they want. We'll get to all of it eventually. The Friday brief will keep going out on Fridays.
If you've read this far — thank you. The most useful thing you can do for an independent publication is forward a piece you liked to one person, once. That's how we've grown for six years, and we're in no hurry to change it.
The people behind the Stronghold
Twelve regular contributors, four full-time editors, one part-time copy chief and a deeply patient bookkeeper. A small sample of the masthead below — full credits at the bottom of every piece.
Marin Vask — Editor-in-Chief
Eight years at two larger gaming sites before co-founding PixelStronghold. Writes about open-world RPGs, fantasy strategy, and the structural design of long playthroughs. Once spent a month inside a single fantasy 4X save.
Oksana Reeve — Reviews Editor
Joined in 2021 from the freelance side. Specialises in indie games, narrative-driven work, and short-format criticism. Maintains the "one year later" series. Reads about a hundred games' worth of patch notes a year and seems happy about it.
Hideki Brand — News Editor
Came to games journalism from a business desk. Writes the Friday brief and most of our coverage on studio economics, expansion cadences, and publisher decision-making in the fantasy and RPG space. Has the only sourced phone in the building.
Lev Hartmann — Culture & Features
Profiles, longform, the occasional 12,000-word essay nobody asked for. Background in film criticism. Spends most of his coverage budget on plane tickets to game-development meet-ups in cities you'd find on a weather map.
Iris Quan — Copy Chief
Catches every dangling modifier in a 4,000-word piece and one factual error you'd rather she hadn't. Part-time, but the part is the important one.
Reuben Owe — Operations
Handles the parts of running a publication that nobody else wants to think about. Subscriber billing, tax filings, the freelance pay cycle, and the email account where people send us their complaints.
Why "independent" matters, specifically.
The word "independent" gets thrown around a lot in media, and frankly it doesn't mean much by itself. Plenty of "independent" outlets are funded by a single venture capital firm, or rely on one fantasy publisher's ad spend, or run sponsored coverage with the disclosure in 8-point grey type at the end of the article.
For us "independent" means three concrete things. First, no investors. The site is owned by the four founders and a small employee trust. Second, no single revenue source above 30% of the budget — if any one subscriber, sponsor, or platform pulled out tomorrow, the lights stay on. Third, no platform dependency: every article is on our own domain, every subscriber email is in our own database, and we could turn off every social account tomorrow without losing the publication.
It's not a moral high ground. It's an architectural choice that lets us write what we want to write. Other models work too — we just picked this one and we'd like you to know we picked it on purpose.