An Overdue Update

By: Jacob Wood, April 30, 2025 News

Well, that was an unexpected hiatus.

One day, you’re chugging along with a successful new Kickstarter for the next year of Accessible Gaming Quarterly. The next thing you know, you haven’t posted anything new to the blog in over two years.

There have been a lot of unexpected ups and downs over the last 26 months or so. Some of them personal, some of them business. Some of them have to do with world events. All of them have impacted my work on Accessible Games in one way or another.

If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you’ll know that I tend to be extremely transparent with how I talk to my audience. I try to give you an inside look at all the ups and downs of game publishing, share precise numbers about my expenses and profits on certain projects, and talk openly about disabilities including how they impact my personal relationship with tabletop games.

Over the last two years, I haven’t been very transparent. Part of that is simple guilt.

Have you ever felt guilty about not being able to do something as intended, and spiraled into a hole where you now don’t feel like talking about it because it brings up that shame?

That’s been my experience. Every time I think about sitting down to write this update, I think about all the ways I’ve laxed on my self-imposed responsibilities to my community. Then I think about all the steps it’s going to take to get caught up. It’s a lot of work, and as someone who currently doesn’t have a lot of spare time, that’s doubly daunting.

I say self-imposed responsibilities because, by and large, nobody but myself is requiring me to do the work I set out to do 15 years ago. With the exception of some Kickstarter backers who deserve to have some products they’ve already paid for, I don’t technically owe anything to the community.

But I set out to do this good work because, back in 2010, it simply needed to be done. it still does. But it’s not as lonely in this space anymore.

I’m grateful to be on a journey now where I’m not the only voice I know of that’s championing accessibility in the tabletop industry. There are dozens of publishers now who’ve made accessibility a top priority, and probably hundreds more who’ve at least begun thinking about it.

That doesn’t give me an excuse to just bugger off and leave the work to everyone else, though. That’s where actual, not self-imposed issues come into play.

A Quick Recap of the Last Two Plus years

When He Who Shall Not Be Named bought Twitter and subsequently tanked it, I lost the largest social media presence I had. It presented a huge blow to my momentum as a creator, because it meant that it was more difficult than ever to reach new audiences.

As the community moved to other platforms, the social media market fragmented. I wasn’t along for the ride, frankly.

  • Mastadon has a fairly large community of ex-Twitterers, but I find its interface tedious and not as accessible as they say it is.
  • BlueSky also has a large number of migrants, but its website accessibility (last I checked) was abysmal.
  • Facebook’s accessibilty has actually somehow gotten worse over the years, and I find it tedious to use. I never liked it to begin with.
  • Meanwhile, I’ve gone from a low vision magnifier user to a non-visual screen reader user. That has meant adjusting to new assistive technology, and it has also meant being more reliant on accessible platforms than ever before.

Basically, I gave up on social media. But despite everyone’s best advice over the years of building and maintaining a mailing list (precisely so you can preserve your audience if other platforms ever die off), I never managed to take the steps necessary to cultivate an email list. Frankly, I never liked email newsletters and certainly didn’t want mine to come across as spammy. That made it difficult to feel like something I could or should do. (Okay, so I guess that part of the issue is self-imposed.)

Despite my audience instantly shrinking, I could have done more to build it back up. It also didn’t mean I couldn’t have continued putting forth the products I had already had in the pipeline, or reaching out to people via different platforms.

But that’s where life issues come in.

I’m not going to go into full, transparent detail here. The last two years have been pretty brutal from a personal perspective, though.

Severe family illness, including a hospitalization without health insurance, knocked out nearly all of my leisure time for the better part of a year. It also cost a lot of money. Money which I didn’t really have to begin with.

Then, as we were recovering and things started to look up, I got laid off from my job. Unexpectedly, without warning but with a lot of medical debt, I had no income. I was also the only income for my family at that point, which meant I had to change that situation as soon as possible.

It took three months of constant job searching and over 100 applications, but I finally have a new job that I’ll be starting in June of this year (2025 as I post this). It’s helping me breathe a little to know that’s coming, but I’ve built up more debt along the way.

What does any of that mean for game design and accessibility advocacy?

Well, quite a lot.

The problem is that game design just doesn’t pay the bills for any but a few people (relative to the industry as a whole). But it’s costly.

Pursuing this work when it doesn’t pay the bills is just something I couldn’t justify. That’s why I’m a year and half behind on Accessible Gaming Quarterly, which funded on Kickstarter all the way back in March 2023. So far, I’ve only launched one issue out of four, and they were supposed to have all been completed by  April 2024.

As a creator, there’s also a death spiral of sorts that’s hard to come out of. Keeping my website up and running costs around $250 per year in web hosting and domain fees. That’s not so much to ask when I have money coming in from new work, but when you go for two years without producing anything new, the revenue just doesn’t cover it.

That means I’ve been operating at a deficit, and my business bank account is drained. Because of the hospitalization and unemployment, I also had to spend the money I raised for AGQ Year 4 on personal expenses, meaning I now have to fund the next three issues out of my own pocket.

My own pocket that’s already deeply in debt.

See the death spiral?

Not Begging For Sympathy

I’m not saying all this to ask for sympathy or charity. I’m trying to be as transparent as I usually am. That means fessing up to things that are uncomfortable and sometimes shameful.

yet ultimately, it’s all human.

I think it’s safe to say that the majority of humans, especially those in my audience, have had a difficult couple of years. The last three months, in particular, have been challenging for everyone who participates in basically any economy on Earth. So I’m confident that I’m not alone in my struggles.

Which is why I’m going to put this out there:

Even though I’m struggling in many ways, I want to be supportive to anyone who needs it, in any way I realistically can contribute. I may not have a lot to give at the moment, but hopefully that will change soon. You can use the Contact us page to reach out to me if you need me for anything.

Also, if you are still somehow in a position where you can continue financially supporting Accessible Games, now is a great time to stock up on our back catalog if you haven’t already.

What’s Happening Now?

Thanks for sticking with me this far. Instead of being all doomy and gloomy, let me take a step aside and focus on some good things.

Sam Byford, editor of Accessible Gaming Quarterly, has been a massive help to me (and ultimately you, my readers). He’s ensured that Accessible Gaming Quarterly Issue 13 and the Accessible Gaming Quarterly Year 3 Anthology have both been published. They’re available in PDF and print-on-demand at DriveThruRPG.

 

I also never announced that all of the year 3 issues are available.

Of course, Survival of the Able, the game about everyday disabled people overcoming a zombie apocalypse, is also available. It’s been out for a while, but hasn’t had the hype it probably deserves.

I’ve also been working, slowly but surely, on a new solo RPG based on retro beat-em-up games like Golden Axe and Streets of Rage. It’s in a fully playable state, and may be the next major launch. I’ll talk more about that in a future update. It started as a side project, but it’s the only gaming I’ve been doing over the last couple years, so it ended up becoming a game of its own.

If you’d like to support funding a game you’ve never heard of before, or would like to just toss some money my way to show your ongoing support, I also have a Ko-Fi page.

Other Projects

Since I was laid off in January, I’ve been working on a portfolio of other writing projects that, hopefully, will make me more marketable. If you’re interested in what else I’m up to, here’s a brief run-down.

It isn’t finished yet, but I started writing a middle grade Choose Your Own Adventure-style book based on Monster Kart Mayhem. You may recognize that as my tabletop RPG about kart racing monsters, which is also available at DriveThruRPG. This may be the start of a new series of children’s books if people find it interesting.

I’ve also been writing weekly on Substack about my other big passions: learning and leadership. Specifically, learning and leadership as they cross over with accessibility.

Growth for ALL (ALL = Accessibility, Learning, and Leadership) is intended to inspire people and teams to approach these topics wholistically. I believe whole-heartedly that personal growth is a team effort, and that it takes us all working together to achieve great things.

If that sounds interesting to you, then you can check out my Substack at https://allforgrowth.substack.com. Signing up for a paid subscription ($8 per month) is another great way to support my work and help me get back to a point where I can focus more time and energy on changing at least a few little corners of the world.

Phew

That was a lot. I hope it didn’t overwhelm you as much as it did me.

If you’re still reading this, thank you. I appreciate your time, your patience with me, and your ongoing support. Consider dropping a comment below, or on whatever platform you found a link to this post, to let me know you’re out there.

Until next time, I wish you all a wonderful day.

Related posts

  1. End-of-Year Update, 2021
  2. Coming Soon – AGQ Year 4 Kickstarter
  3. Open Call: Authors and Artists for AGQ Year 2