It’s finally happening folks: The Citra Team would like to announce that we now have a project-wide Patreon. This will be a way for you, our users, to donate directly to the Citra developers, in support of their efforts to continue to make Citra the best option available to enjoy 3DS games. Patreon will be yet another way for our biggest fans to contribute to the project.

Why start a Patreon now?

This is something that has been requested by users for several years now. However, the Citra Team has been a bit apprehensive. In the past, we have had some concerns about how a Patreon might be distributed among the developers. We’ve also been concerned that the idea of profiting from emulation may taint the free and open source spirit of Citra. We would like to be crystal clear: Citra will always be free and completely open source, and we have no plans to use Patreon to put our project behind any form of paywall.

However, there have been a few emulator teams that have had very successful Patreons in recent years, and users have seen these projects make tremendous progress. Naturally, many such users have asked the question, “How much further progress could Citra make if they had a Patreon?”

While we do not know the exact answer to this question, after some careful consideration, we’ve decided that a Patreon is a good move for Citra. Our developers dedicate hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of hours to the project purely out of passion for emulation and software development. However, this is not sustainable, as our developers also have to balance time between real life, work and school. We, as a team, believe that having a Patreon will both motivate (and eventually enable) our developers to work even harder on Citra.

We believe that we’ve come up with a plan to fairly share the Patreon among the core members of our team. Furthermore, as a team, we are all firm in our commitment to ensure that Patreon will only be used to incentivize open source development, and not to charge users for Citra.

How will Citra’s Patreon work?

Citra will have a project-wide Patreon – there will be a single way to donate and contribute to the entire team. Donations to this Patreon will be shared evenly among the core members of the Citra Team (this includes developers, but also may include our most active administrators and writers). Core membership will be established based on a combination of tenure and activity. We want to ensure that our long time contributors are rewarded, but also that there is room for our newer “heavy-hitting” developers to be part of this.

Thanks for reading, and we hope that you support us in this endeavor!