2025 Overview/Quick Survey To Make MinnMax Better (Patreon)

Hello everybody, Ben Hanson here with your annual check-up. With the start of a new year, we'd love to get a sense of where you all are at and how we can do better here at MinnMax in 2026.

Please click here to complete our quick survey, feel free to skip any questions and to check multiple boxes.

We're really proud of everything we built together in 2025. As always, we cannot thank you enough for directly supporting independent games media. We're aiming to create an outlet based on gaming insight, thoughtful conversations, and fun personalities. We've gained 1,000 paid Patreon supporters this year, which is huuuuge for us. Your support on Patreon has allowed us to hire a Production Assistant to help alleviate some workflow stresses on the backend with producing, editing, and creating social clips for our content. So thank you! We're currently going through the 130 applications we've received, you're still welcome to apply if you have experience editing video, using Photoshop, and creating social clips - send your resume and examples to job@minnmax.com

To catch up on some of MinnMax's Best Moments from 2025, here's a highlight video recap for you - https://youtu.be/e6mHbc1b3GQ

Our goals for 2025 were to debut "Guest Cohorts", Charge Shots for bigger one-off New Show Plus episodes, and (more importantly) launch a whole new podcast with Pew Pew Bang. It was honor for the new show Pew Pew Bang to win an Astra award for Best Gaming Podcast, a huge accomplishment for the women of MinnMax. Subscribe to Pew Pew Bang and help spread the word. We're feeling good about these new components of MinnMax, hope you've enjoyed them as well. Oh, and thanks to Janet Garcia our self-improvement series BetterQuest came back in 2025 with a new, more visually interesting format. We hope to record more this year as well.

Thanks to everybody from the MinnMax community who came out to our big community meetup in Minneapolis in August, another big meetup in Asheville is still very much on our radar so stay tuned for more information on that front. One of my favorite things this year was rallying the community in Minneapolis to volunteer with us and prepare meals for the less fortunate. We also broke records by raising over $102,000 for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota during our Give To The Max stream, you all also quickly mobilized to raise over $12,000 to help uplift the Somali community in Minnesota during our reaction stream to The Game Awards.

We went international this year with travelogues covering Gamescom in both Brazil and Germany in addition to San Francisco with the Game Developers Conference and Los Angeles for Summer Game Fest. Oh, and we also covered a monster truck rally and were delighted to attend a preview event for the Nintendo Switch 2.

You requested more full game playthroughs, so this year we streamed Sarah and Haley playing through Silent Hill f, Ronnie and Ben playing Split Fiction, and Haley soloing Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. There were in-person gameplay streams like Alanah Pearce teaching Janet why the original DOOM is a masterpiece and Suriel Vazquez kicking Ben's butt in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. We celebrated the launch of a new console with a fun in-studio stream on the day the Switch 2 launched! There's also our group gameplay sessions with the series Max Settings, which led to a lot of fun in games like Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6. All of our solo Twitch streams are archived on our overflow YouTube channel called Stream Archives, where we also have all of the archives of our GeForce NOW streams AND Jeff Marchifava playing too many roguelikes to count.

Interviews (both Rapid-Fire and vanilla) continue to be a success for getting MinnMax out of our bubble, we look forward to doing even more in 2026. We also still love the developer one-on-one format, like we did this year with the developers of 1000xResist and Mouthwashing. This last year we also were graced with insight from Shuhei Yoshida, the former head of PlayStation's Interactive Worldwide Studios. He joined us for a lengthy interview (where he revealed the first PlayStation game ever created) AND the big reveal stream for the Nintendo Switch 2, which is the first time we've ever seen the live reaction of a former head of the big 3 react to a new console reveal.

In addition to extended conversations via Max Spoilers for the most important movies and games like Death Stranding 2, we also followed our passions this year with a surprise Max Spoilers on Richard Linklater's film Boyhood. There was the incredible work from the community with the third annual Doc Lightning short documentary film festival and Kyle Bosman prompted the cohorts to show off their artistic skills with an art festival of our own.

For folks scared of Patreon, we launched YouTube Memberships (as an equivalent to the Backstage Pass tier) via a clip reaction marathon. Another fun experiment was creating a pilot for gaming's "Criterion Closet" with Kelsey Lewin hosting Camouflaj's founder Ryan Payton in an informative stroll through a Pink Gorilla game store in Seattle. In a perfect world, we'd create a thousand more of these but we can't guarantee it as a regular show at this point. On that note, there have been some misses this year. The big thing is a lack of MinnMax Spotlights, our studio tour/travelogue series we launched with two episodes in 2024. As discussed on a recent Bonus Pod, there have been dozens and dozens of conversations about studio visits but none crossed the finish line in 2025. That said, we'd love to line up some insightfuls game studio visits this year so we'll keep pushing on this end. There's also Trivia Tower, which certainly slowed down its release cadence. It's a time-intensive show to put together so to make sure it pays for itself we want episodes to be sponsored, pushing for sponsorships is another time-intensive initative but we're happy to keep it rolling when things line up in the future.

MinnMax is getting more and more complex as it grows, there are always areas for improvement. Heading into 2026, here are a couple of no-brainers we can commit to...

More accurate timestamps for the ad-free version of The MinnMax Show

Hiring a production assistant to help with Ben's workload

Scheduling out our reaction streams on YouTube, for better reminders on your end

Multi-streaming our reaction streams on Twitch and YouTube

We're going to experiment with recording via Riverside instead of Discord for improved audio quality

More episodes of BetterQuest

Using the Collections feature on Patreon,

Better communication for the Wall of Heroes slideshow

A new benefit for Patreon's highest tier

Okay, there's other stuff from 2025 and improvements for 2026 but hopefully that's a helpful overview for you. Please click through and help us out by filling out this quick survey via Google Forms, it'll help us keep improving into the future. I'm very excited to launch into 2026 with you all, why can't I read next year's summary right now?!?!? Thanks again for your continued support and keep the feedback coming in comments and beyond. Thaaaaaaaank you!

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