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This week, I spoke to Stephen Totilo, one of the most experienced video games reporters working, about his two-and-a-half years as an independent creator-journalist.
In this episode:
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Stephen Totilo’s time was up.
His employer gave him four months’ notice; after that, they would no longer be able to fund his games newsletter. He had through December 2023 to figure out what came next.
Stephen had joined Axios not three years earlier, after spending 12 years at Kotaku, one of the most popular video games publications on the internet. Vanishingly few journalists have covered this industry as long as Stephen, who got his start as a games reporter for MTV in 2005.
When Axios informed him of his impending unemployment, Stephen decided to try the solo creator journalist route.
He’d come close to it already in 2020, while still at Kotaku. A reporter at heart, after nearly a decade as Editor in Chief, he missed writing his own stories, which is part of why he decided not to go independent at the time, being worried about name recognition after so long behind the scenes.
The Axios opportunity came along shortly after, allowing Stephen to fulfill his desire to return to reporting without losing the safety and structure of traditional employment.
By the time Axios decided to shut Stephen’s newsletter down, he’d rebuilt that name recognition, with a loyal, thousands-strong audience reading his work every week. It was an amicable transition; he was allowed to promote his new venture on his way out. He announced Game File, his independent project, on December 13, 2023. By New Year’s Day, he already had 192 paying subscribers.
Two-and-a-half years as an independent voice
Stephen publishes one free and two paywalled issues per week. With over two decades of experience as a games reporter, he has a thorough network of sources and a deep well of knowledge; insiders trust him and come to him with tips.
One big feature last year saw him digging in legal files for details about a Star Wars video game superfan suing a games company for false advertising based on a four-second segment from a years-old teaser trailer. His connections also enable him to run, for example, an interview between his nine-year-old twin children and the director of product communications for a PlayStation baseball game.
In a post reflecting on one year of Game File, Stephen shared a few key metrics, including:
Paid subscribers: 1,079
Total subscribers: 17,000+
He wrote another anniversary post to mark two years of Game File, this one published on January 23, 2026. This was another year of growth, though not as fruitful as the first:
Paid subscribers: 1,400+
Total subscribers: 25,000+
In the four months since that post, the number of paid subscribers hasn’t changed much, but the total subscriber count has surpassed 27,000. All told, Stephen has a solid business on his hands, currently generating over $140,000 in annualized revenue. But, as he put it, “the number isn’t quite as good as it might initially look. 10% of that goes to Substack, 3% to my payment processor Stripe and a healthy chunk goes to taxes.”
The perfect version of Game File
I asked Stephen what it would take for him to take another job, to join up with another media company as an employee. The answer is other people; an opportunity to help and shape other writers. The “perfect version of Game File“ is one where he “can help other journalists succeed,” as he did at Kotaku.
“I worry about the ability and opportunity for young journalists to get trained and to do effective reporting. And I don't know that there's enough outlets out there, even established ones, that can give people those opportunities.
I feel like I would be squandering my experience if I wasn't able to, in some way, help build up other journalists. One way of doing that, I think, would be for Game File to be able to sustain more guest writers or even have a small team.”
A team would not come cheap. In his first anniversary post, Stephen estimated “it’d take around 1200-1500 paid sign-ups to justify each additional full-timer. It’d take far fewer to bring in freelance writers, freelance illustrators and other contributors.”
In year two, he did work with freelancers. He published six freelance articles under a specific compensation system:
$300 minimum fee
Plus “a quarter of revenue from any annual subscriptions that Game File gained in the 24 hours after their story ran.”
Stephen has no desire to be a businessperson — at heart and in his element, he is a reporter. Still, I asked him about advertising. He’s open to the idea of working with somebody else to sell ads, but on an ethical level, he has no interest in selling ads himself.
The downside of a paywall, of course, is that not everybody who wants to read Game File can. Multiple people have approached him offering to invest in the business so he can hire more reporters, maybe an ad salesperson, drop the paywall, and build the publication of his dreams.
For now, though, it’s “empowering and exciting,” he says, to have readers directly pay him for his journalism. The subscription model suits a veteran solo reporter with a value system to match.
“To know that even like 10% of the people who find my work interesting are then willing to give me $10 for the month or $100 for the year, and that I no longer have to worry that some private equity company is going to come in and make my whole staff demoralized and make us all want to quit. […]
It's so much more straightforward. I do the work. Would you like to support it? Would you like to pay for it? […]
And that works. And I can afford to then clock out, take my kids to soccer, take my kids to gymnastics. Like, that's great.”
A few lessons about subscription businesses
1. Sales and seasonality
The Game File paid subscriber chart has "almost consistently been going up” since launch. There has been one notable dip — August 2024, six months in. Stressed, Stephen reached out to other people with subscription media businesses.
“Summer is bad,” they told him; “don’t worry, people don’t pay for things in the summer, but hey, run a sale.” He ran the sale; people paid. He ran another sale at the 12-month mark. At the 18-month mark, another sale.
Those first three sales lasted about 1 week each. Instead of waiting for the 24-month mark, Stephen ran a short sale for Black Friday last year; again, it worked.
Each one of these sales has been “good for about 100 paid subs.” The discount has been for the yearly price, from $100 down to $75 or $80.
2. How much should you charge for a subscription?
How much should you charge for a subscription product? When I interviewed college sports journalist Matt Brown last year, he told me his readers had no price sensitivity between $6 and $11 per month.
Stephen charges $10 per month or $100 per year and has not experimented with pricing, but he did have something to share on the topic from one of his interview subjects, a video game developer named Nick Kaman.
Kaman and his team at Aggro Crab, alongside another studio called Landfall, released a game called Peak last year. They sold it for $8, a number based on price sensitivity observartion.
“We had this joke of, like, how much is a game really?” Kaman told me, as we chatted last month.
“In a player’s mind, what does it mean to spend five bucks? Well, that’s five bucks. But six bucks? Well, that’s still five bucks.
“Four bucks is also kind of five bucks,” he continued. “Three bucks is two bucks. And two bucks is basically free.
“So we’ve got these tiers: You know, twelve bucks… that’s ten bucks. But thirteen bucks is fifteen bucks.
“And we found that eight bucks is still five bucks. It doesn’t become ten bucks. Seven ninety nine, that’s five bucks, right?
“So, eight bucks going to five bucks is the biggest differential we could find in pricing, so we found it very optimal.”
Even if you have a higher-ticket subscription product, I’d wager this type of logic holds. Look for that differential around your anchor price.
3. Subscriber retention is as important as acquisition
Rule number one of newsletter subscribers: they will leave you. Past a certain list size critical mass, every time you send a newsletter, you will lose subscribers. People clean out their inboxes. They lose interest. This holds true for paid subscribers, too.
While Stephen did not have specific advice for retaining paying subscribers, he noticed how important it was for him, psychologically, to “be able to look at a chart on a day when the number doesn't go up and say, hey, but Stephen, you know what? You probably retained some people.”
