Happy 1 Year Birthday 2024 – No Advertising, No Affiliate Links, Clean, New Articles Every Day at 5AM PST at PlayGamesMore.com

Happy Birthday PlayGamesMore.com, today the website turns 1 years old publishing articles, games, events and more. Our first published post is pictured below and available to read here

Yeah, I know, not too much to look at, lol. It was more a placeholder than any groundbreaking article. I’d say the first real article on this site came on day #2: Stern Insider Connected Machines – Turn It On, Owners! — and as recently as last week I suggested this to another pinball player frustrated at heading into a business that had IC-connected machines that weren’t actually connected. It’s a personal goal of mine to try and spread the gospel on Stern Insider Connected.

And we have a PGM summer 2024 event related to this, see: Summer 2024 Pinball PlayGamesMore Event: Visit Multiple Insider Connected Locations

Now, the rest of this will be tooting our own horn for a bit. We’ve never done this before and promise it won’t be something you read here often. Please forgive the self-promotion, because if we don’t do it, who else will?

(hopefully you!)

If this type of stuff isn’t your bag, it’s all good, eject safely now. The next article will not be coming with any leftover birthday cake.

Have a question for you to think about.

How many gaming-related websites are completely ad-free in 2024? Look around. There just aren’t that many. The internet is littered with gaming websites that have ads everywhere, embedded affiliate links in their stories/articles and have company relationships to receive free and/or promoted products and services in exchange for coverage.

At playgamesmore.com as of this writing, we do none of this. Intentionally. Deliberately.

No gaming (or any other) company relationships, no advertising, no affiliate links.

Clean.

Recently this was added as a subtitle. And I chuckled when I saw Google highlight it via one of the search terms responses.

Let’s talk briefly about the “no gaming-company relationships” and what this means specifically. Should be self-explanatory but sadly in 2024, it’s not. Your favorite gaming YouTuber, Twitch streamer, are they making content sometimes based upon games and/or hardware that was given to them in exchange for coverage and promotion?

We don’t do this.

In fact, companies reading this: please do not contact us (PGM, the publication) with offers for anything free. We really, truly don’t want or need.

We buy games on our own, thousands and thousands of dollars worth — and we might buy yours — we stream and share games with each other we like (or dislike sometimes), and we write about and share games we enjoy — or don’t enjoy — playing. If we don’t like something, we don’t recommend buying it to each other, you know, like most friends do with each other.

Affiliate links can be sneaky to strip out sometimes because they slip in when quoting other articles. When/where possible these are edited and removed. All links here, the goal, anyway is to be free from having any affiliate links. If you see one, please point it out and these codes will be removed. Our goal is to present clean links to every source, period. There might be extremely rare exceptions someday that we intentionally include one somewhere, but if/when there are: it will be very clear the link leads to somewhere that if clicked and some kind of purchase is made, somebody is making $$ (especially if it’s us). That’s an FTC requirement, too.

We’re not 100% anti-commercialism at PGM and someday we may decide to take on sponsors, run limited advertising, have some kind of tip jar or use another way to make money at this website. It’s fine for sites to make money, no shade, but when these ads permeate and get in the way of playing games, reading about games and viewing true, honest objective opinions about games, that’s where we’re trying to be … different. Cooler about it.

Clean.

There aren’t many gaming-related websites that have fresh content every single day with no advertising and no affiliate marketing. Somebody has to create this stuff. And it takes time. We aren’t using AI to write articles. The hundreds of articles I contributed here were all hand-typed from brain to fingers to the digital draft bin, edited, polished, scheduled and published. Sometimes gremlins get by and updates need to be made. Some posts, particularly the more newsy-ones have multiple and sometimes very detailed updates, so if you have favorite articles in the past year, you might want to return and look for “UPDATE.” You might be surprised by some of these updates. It’s just easier to update an existing article than write a brand new one, if there isn’t a significant amount of new material, anyway. Or some angle maybe that we didn’t cover.

Just for transparency, the money-makings stuff will be a year by year decision, because this website does cost some money to run and I’ve been paying for it out of my pocket. The costs for most websites when they start out are minimal. Of course, if fortunate, the more popular a website becomes, costs can/will increase. Will monitor that and update accordingly.

The hosting (barring any extraneous costs) and domain for this website have already been paid until/through November 2028.

Recently, by multiple reader requests, we added a way to subscribe and be notified whenever there are new articles posted to the site: https://playgamesmore.com/subscribe-to-playgamesmore/ — if you’re reading this and not subscribed, please take a minute and do so. It will help remind you every day what’s new here.

This will generate an email notification, at least, every day at 5am PST (GMT-8), but some days we can/do/will run more than one article (maybe today at a later time…?). You can easily unsubscribe if the flow should ever be too much. And no, there aren’t any ads, sponsors, affiliate links or money making schemes inside these emails either.

Squeaky clean.

As of this publishing there are over 100 articles scheduled into the future. If every year we add 100+ more days into the future, in 10 years we’d be scheduled over 2+ years into the future. It seems unlikely we’ll be able to generate that volume of future scheduled content and who knows what the future will bring, but hey, it’s a good goal to have.

And traffic and readership at PGM are increasing. A year ago we had no readership, today we have more than none 😉 Hopefully, next year we have more than we have now 🙂 Thank you, thank you, thank you. We must be onto something. Something gamers like. You will decide, friendly gamer readers. You are the best to decide the future of publications like this. By voting with your time and interest.

Bookmark and subscribe to PGM today, read and leave a comment and if you really enjoy something here, share it with others (there are links at the bottom of every article to make it easier to share, just click and go)! Spread the word and thank you, always and forever, for reading.

Happy gaming to all!