On January 31st 2021, TETR.IO will close its Patreon and partner with Xsolla for swift and secure ingame payments. This means that Patrons will no longer be billed, and the Patreon page will no longer be accessible.
In its place, TETR.IO Supporter will now become directly accessable and purchasable from within the game. The key points:

• TETR.IO Supporter will be a non-renewing subscription. This means you buy any amount of months in bulk whenever you see fit, and if you don't renew, your Supporter status will expire on its own.
• TETR.IO Supporter will be a single tier, and contain all the rewards of what used to be the Deca tier.
• TETR.IO Supporter will cost €5 before taxes. Gifts and any month after the third bought in bulk are €4. So, buying 4 months at once is €19, or €16 as a gift.
• You will be able to gift Supporter to other players at any moment, just like adding months to your own support.
• You can add months at any time and your expiry date will be extended.
• You will be able to manage your Supporter subscription from your account settings at any time.
• Payments will be powered by Xsolla, allowing you to use hundreds of different payment systems to fulfill the purchase.
• Payments should usually be processed instantly, although depending on the payment system used there may be a small delay.
• Refunds will go through Xsolla. The applicable refund policy can be read here.
• The Perfect Clear tier reward (having your name in the Special Thanks) can be achieved by reaching a certain total amount of support, racked up by buying months and/or gifting months.

I'm currently supporting you on Patreon. What's going to change?

Thank you very much for your support! Don't worry, I've got you covered. Here's what will change for you on the 31st:

• You will no longer be automatically billed by Patreon.
• If you were supporting me at Deca tier and up, you will immediately receive three free months of Supporter in the new system.
• If you choose to not use Xsolla, your Supporter role will simply expire after those three months are up, without any further costs on your side. If you wish to keep supporting me, you may add months anytime.
• As thanks for your early support, everyone who has been a patron on or before the 31st will receive an exclusive "early supporter" badge! (Note: this is applied by email address. If you haven't received your badge by the 1st, let me know.)
• You may temporarily lose the Discord role on the TETR.IO Discord. To get it back, simply go into your account settings on TETR.IO after the update, and link your Discord there to get it back.

Why switch systems?

There's quite a few reasons, to be honest. Above all, while Patreon is a very nice system for creators to receive a stable and sustainable income for their work, it is not meant to sell a service on. Patreon is very easy to use if you are say, a YouTube creator looking to receive some support from fans. You can set up simple tiers, show behind-the-scenes footage, talk to fans and quickly export lists of all patrons of any tier for use in credits.

Patreon, however, falls flat when you try to use it for an actual service. While TETR.IO Supporter is still in essence a donation, the rewards bound to it are hard to automate and handle smoothly on Patreon. Patreon's administration and integration is sadly lacking on this front, and understandably so - Patreon isn't made for it! This caused players' Supporter benefits to often be applied late, and require a lot of work to fulfill.

On top of that, the monthly autorenew model of Patreon is very expensive. Patreon in general is known to stack fees quite heavily, but this is increased a lot by the sheer amount of (small) transactions. This is the reason TETR.IO Supporter was so expensive (€10 before taxes for the Deca tier, really?) - the fees for small transactions would cause so much money to be lost it would stop being worthwhile.

Finally, due to being an autorenewing model, Patreon does not support very many payment methods. On paper, it supports credit cards and PayPal, but in reality, PayPal support is limited because a PayPal account would need to have a credit card or bank account linked with it. This caused many people to approach me asking if they could somehow purchase Supporter in another way, which wasn't possible at the time.

That said, I do believe Patreon is a very powerful platform for those it's meant for. Its tools are very strong for creators, and have caused quite a positive change in the industry! I am glad to have been able to use Patreon for the time I have, and I would never have been able to grow as large as I am now without Patreon giving me a platform to receive your donations on.

What makes Xsolla the better fit?

Above all, Xsolla's expertise in specifically games makes for a far better fit. Xsolla's tools are all geared specifically to game developers and players, and can deeply integrate into your work without inhibiting your creative process. This not only makes things a lot easier for me, it also makes purchasing Supporter a lot easier.

Since Xsolla deeply integrates into the game, buying Supporter is easier than ever. You can open up the Supporter dialog from many places, and move on immediately to the purchase process. As soon as your payment is confirmed, you almost always immediately get the rewards. In my testing, I can get from the home menu to being a proud Supporter within twenty seconds, without any need to create accounts, link other services, send messages or other hassle. In the same way, there is also very little work involved in handling Supporter on my end — I practically only have to handle refunds. This means you can get your Supporter rewards within seconds instead of hours (or sometimes days).

On top of that, due to the model I'm using not being autorenewing, fees can be far lower. Due to that, I'm confident to be able to lower the price of Supporter by more than half, while allowing you to buy Supporter freely without being tied to any autorenewing subscriptions. There's this element of subscription models that cashes in on people forgetting to disable a subscription that I honestly very much dislike. Maybe I'm simply not fit for this business, but I wish players to be able to get Supporter without having to worry about yet another subscription in a world where almost everything seems to have a subscription nowadays.

On top of that, Xsolla supports hundreds of payment providers, which means you can pay with just about anything, not just credit cards and PayPal. Xsolla is trusted by many other large games and related sites (Roblox, Twitch, Epic Games, XSplit, osu!, just to name a few).

I am glad to be able to partner with Xsolla to bring you a more fair way to support the game we love. I am incredibly grateful for all the support I have received ever since going into Alpha. We're reaching closer and closer to the 1-million player mark every day, which is a number I NEVER expected to be able to even dream about! I want to thank everyone who's supported me to get this far — let's make 2021 count!