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This post originally appeared on This Week in Pinball on September 17, 2025.
As part of the September Back Indie Media Drive, I’m shedding some light on how I think about Kineticist in the long term, what it takes to run a publication like this, and why it needs your support to continue.
In our last update, I wrote about the identity crisis of calling myself a journalist and what it means to do journalistic work in this space. This time, I want to get practical and talk about dollars, cents, and the tools we use to produce our work every week.
Running Kineticist and This Week in Pinball is not free, cheap, or something a sane person would do for fun. I know this. You know this. Or if you didn’t, now you do. To keep it sustainable and, importantly, independent, it needs support from readers like you.
Every year, it costs me roughly $10,000 to keep Kineticist and This Week in Pinball running. That’s more than the cost of a new-in-box Stern Premium pinball machine.
When I started this project, I was buying about one new-in-box game a year. But now, Kineticist is my “new machine”. It’s where that money goes.
But unlike a game that sits in my basement, this one’s playable by tens of thousands of people every single month and contributes to the vibrancy of what I’ve often thought of as the best gaming community on the planet.
That’s why I’m asking: if you enjoy what we do here and want projects like this to continue, please support us with a paid subscription. $60/year is the most popular option. Five bucks a month. Or a cheap beer at an arcade.
Colin is the chief pixel pusher at Kineticist. He's a lifetime gamer who became enamored with pinball after taking in a family copy of the 1979 classic Joker Poker (the EM version). Since then he's bought, sold and repaired many machines, competed in all kinds of tournaments, and contributes to This Week in Pinball, the New England Pinball League, and Pin-Masters of New England. Previously, Colin spent over a decade working in marketing for agencies and tech startups. He also started and ran a music blog, happy hour website, and wrote a regular craft beer review column for Central Track in Dallas. Once aspired to be an artsy film director.
I’ve wanted to write something like this for a long time. It’s heavily inspired by the detailed list that our friends at Pinball Map have on their website, but since we’re not an open-source project, it always seemed a bit too transparent.
Keep in mind, I’m not a coder! I rely on a variety of platforms and tools that enable me to build without dealing with too much code.
Are there ways to do this more effectively and cost-efficiently? Of course. Could a full-stack developer build something like this in their sleep? No doubt in my mind. But, this is how I, as a marketer-cum-journalist was able to build something that works on my own.
Here’s what I like to think of as my “not a coder” tax. They provide important connections between tools or other time-saving automations that help me maximize my time and spend more of it creating content.
Why tell you all this? Because indie media projects like this one don’t survive on positive vibes alone. It survives because people believe in it enough to chip in and support it.
I used to think that if the work’s good enough, it will speak for itself and people will subscribe on principle. But that’s just not how things work. That’s why I’m doing things like participating in the Back Indie Media Drive and why I’m being so blunt and transparent here.
I’m contributing at least a pinball machine a year. Can you contribute, too, with a new paid subscription?
Our subscription options range from $25/year to $120/year. Most people pick $60/year.
Paid subscribers get the satisfaction of keeping us independent, access to our private Discord server, and exclusive content like our Moving Units series.
But, more importantly, your support helps us continue working for you, instead of chasing advertisers and sponsors.
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