No Press Events
We do not attend press events on a publisher’s dime. We will not accept invitations to be flown out for press events or for “hands-on” time with games. We will never attend a review event (this is where publishers fly reviewers out and the game is played in a controlled environment).
No Swag
We do not accept gifts of any value. Publishers, if you send these, we’re likely to send it back to you. Of course if we do receive any gifts, we’ll inform of our readers and let them know what course of action was taken; either gifts returned, donated, or simply trashed. Gifts include food and drinks, though that’s not a problem since we don’t allow dinner or parties with PR reps.
Review Copies
We do accept review copies of video games, DVD/Blu-ray, and books. If we receive a product for review we’ll always disclose that the product was provided by the publisher. We will not trade these games in for cash or credit of any kind. No, we don’t consider review copies to be gifts; we consider them necessary for the site, since if we had to buy every game there wouldn’t be many reviews posted.
Review Scale
We are not now, nor will we ever be, included in Metacritic or any other review aggregator. Metacritic is bad for the developers, bad for the consumers, and bad for the reviewers. We don’t want to be a part of that crowd.
As a result, we no longer use the games media standard of a 10, 20, or 100 point scale. We don’t even use a five star scale. Our review scale, effective January 1, 2013, is a four-star scale.
Review copies have no influence on the amount of stars a game receives. We aren’t concerned with pleasing the PR reps or the publisher’s in general. All review copies sent to us are done so under the agreement that we’ll provide an honest review of the game
Giveaways
In the past, we’ve given away beta codes and games (digital and physical). Because of some previous issues, we will no longer run giveaway contests on our site effective January 1, 2013. Publisher’s, don’t even bother sending us extra copies of anything to giveaway. We aren’t interested.
Advertising
This is pretty simple. We’re proudly hosted on WordPress.com and this means we aren’t concerned with advertisements. This is a hobby site ran by volunteers, not a job. You won’t find annoying and intrusive ads on our site. You also will not find any gaming ads on the site (more than likely).
We are part of the WordAds program and any ads (small videos at the bottom of posts) are handled by WordPress and their partners. We have no say over any of it. We also, on occasion, link to products we talk about on Amazon as we are part of their Associate program.
In the interest of complete disclosure, we make $1 for every 1,000 people who see an ad. Most of our visitors are using ad-blockers, so we’re making practically nothing from these ads. That’s okay, we use ad-blockers too.
Since we can’t sell advertising, we aren’t reliant on gaming publishers to keep the site running. Those of you who can see ads on the site, enjoy your Cheerios commercials.
UPDATE (April 27, 2013): There have been some gaming ads on the site recently (most notably an ad for Metro: Last Light). We don’t have any say over the ads, so these ads are coming from WordPress (well whoever they use) and we can’t control what types of ads are displayed. So if you see a gaming ad on the site, know that it isn’t there because we’re getting paid by the publisher to put it there.
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