Occasionally, we will post sponsored content. Below are the details on what that means and why we are doing it.
How will I know which posts are sponsored?
Per popular search engine best practices, we annotate all sponsored posts with a note and a link to this page (which is probably how you found it). We don't anticipate these becoming a regular practice, but we will be sure to point them out when we do make a sponsored post.
If there is no sponsored post disclaimer on the top of the page, before the review text starts, in bold text like this, then you are not reading a sponsored post.
What is a sponsored post?
A sponsored post is when a developer, publisher, or someone else involved with a game pays us to post content. It's that simple. Sponsored posts may be news stories, features, or reviews.
The first thing to note is that any words published on this site (unless specifically noted as a press release or quote) are written by Pixelated Cardboard. We will not allow sponsored posts to be written by outside parties, the words and opinions remain ours alone. We also don't publish everything we are approached with, we passed up many opportunities for sponsored posts before deciding on a good fit for our first.
A sponsored news story or feature will be fairly straightforward. A game announcement, or an in-depth look at a game, most likely.
Reviews are a bit different. This is something that has been covered on all corners of the internet. What we will say about our situation is if we are approached by somebody for a sponsored review and think it might be a fit, the first thing we well them is that we won't guarantee a certain score or favorable review. We will try our best to remain objective and point out flaws like we do in every other review. Our intention is to write the review so that you wouldn't know it was a sponsored post if we didn't tell you.
We have built a platform upon which developers and publishers want to get their games mentioned, and we have done that through writing truthful, in-depth reviews of digital board games. We know that if we betray our reader's trust, we won't have this platform anymore so we certainly aren't going to jeopardize that trust for a few bucks. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to decide if our reasoning and disclaimers are enough to trust our review, and we leave the choice in the reader's hands. We welcome feedback on this issue if you have strong feelings either way, feel free to contact us at pixelatedcardboard@gmail.com
Why?
If you follow us on Twitter you may have occasionally seen some insight into the financial inner workings of our site. In short; you don't start a digital board game review website to make money. However, you also don't start one for it to become a money pit. We use affiliate links and ads. For a while we made enough on Apple affiliate links to cover monthly hosting costs more often than not. Unfortunately, Apple ended the payments for apps through their affiliate service. Ads and other affiliate links are hit and miss, but we are essentially left with footing much of the hosting bill and buying all of the apps, with only a small fraction covered by incoming revenue. You don't want to read our whining on money, but we're getting to the point. A single sponsored post can cover a few months of hosting costs. That eases our minds quite a bit and allows us to continue pushing forward full steam on purchasing all new releases to review. We don't expect to turn a profit on this site, but getting closer to a zero sum cost makes things much easier for us.