The Candid Gamer exists for two reasons. The first is the most important. The second, interestingly enough has morphed slightly.
The first and most important reason.
I love video games and gaming. I wrote a post touching on this slightly called “What’s the point?“
I’ve owned at one point in time literally all of the NES consoles, along with every single evolution of the Nintendo Gameboy and multiple iterations of the DS systems. However, I’m not an exclusive Nintendo fan boy.
I had a Sega Genesis growing up and gamed with my friend on his Dreamcast (so much House of the Dead). I still have my original Xbox, bought the 360 elite (no Red Ring of Death for me!), traded that in when the Xbox One came out and I was lucky enough to have someone offer me an Xbox Series X for retail price. I was a little late to game on getting a PlayStation back in the day but I was in the second wave of release for the PS2 at our frequented GameStop and have continued up to the PS4 (still hoping on snagging a PS5).
I love gaming. I honestly could say gaming is a part of me. The top three things for me are the story, music and gameplay. Graphics aren’t as important, at least as to what kind/type/style/etc. For me the graphics need to be engaging and work for the game. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Halo Infinite, both beautiful games but I equally love the graphics of games like Dead Cells, Chasm, Children of Morta or Hollow Knight. Because it works for the game.
So, I think I’ve nerded out enough that hopefully you get the level of love I have for gaming.
What’s the second reason?
Well back in 2021 I decided to take a stab at working some side hustles to not only make some extra income but maybe it was something I could wind up doing full time. You know never know. So I stepped out on several ventures and one of them was this blog.
The others that shall remain nameless, fizzled, died and have been cast away to the remnants of the broken past.
One of the ventures I wanted to explore was what’s called affiliate marketing. If you’ve never heard of that before, it’s basically, I sign up for affiliate marketing through various programs, tell you about a product, post a link and if you click that link and then buy the product within a certain time frame, I get a small percentage.
I was curious to try this out but there’s no way I could take all this time and energy and put all this work into something unless I was passionate about it. So the question was, what should I blog about? It came to me pretty quick, why not gaming? Excellent! I did a little research, I already knew about Amazon affiliate but found out GameStop has an affiliate program as well. Even better!
So I got all excited, bought the domain name and got my hosting going and all that wonderfulness only to find out that the percentage Amazon offers through their affiliate program for video game purchases is abysmally low.
1%
Yes, only one percent.
Physical video games and video game consoles, a whopping 1%.
Well about what the GameStop affiliate program?
Over at Geniuslink they give a good summary of what you get through GameStop.
“GameStop offers a pretty competitive commission rate to Amazon for new and used games – offering 1% commission for Digital Games and Subscriptions, and up to 5% commission for pre-owned games and collectibles. Amazon only offers a flat 1% for “Video Games” in comparison, which means there may be more incentive to recommend GameStop if you’re reviewing older games.”
You can read the full article by clicking here.
So all in all, not really a huge money maker. To top that off, when you apply for the amazon affiliate program, if you don’t get “X” number of sales in a month you’ll get suspended or something akin to that. Also, the GameStop program might not even approve you. I was actually denied by GameStop at first (probably because when I did I had next to nothing on my site).
Why am I telling you all this?
The site is called “The Candid Gamer” because I have to be honest and true to myself and I’m going to be that way with everyone else. I figured the about page would be a great spot to dive into the reason or reasons behind it all. So, to reiterate, if you read about a game through this blog, click the link and then buy it, I will get a small percentage. Honestly though, I started this as an attempt for a source of income doing something I love yet now, I’m doing something I love and hopefully maybe I might make something of it.
If you’ve read this far, I’m glad you’re here and I hope you enjoy what you find.