Affiliate disclosure
Required As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
The short version
PlayNext is free, has no ads and no account. It pays for itself through affiliate links. If you buy something after clicking one, we may receive a commission from the retailer. You pay exactly the same price either way — the commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not your wallet.
Which links are affiliate links
Amazon
Every "Find on Amazon" button on this site is an affiliate link, tagged to the
Amazon Associates account playnext07-20. They appear on the
game finder, on every individual game page, and alongside recommendations on your
My Games page.
PC price links
The "Best PC price" buttons go through CheapShark, which is where the live price data comes from. CheapShark's terms require sending buyers through their own redirect, which carries their affiliate tag — so PlayNext earns nothing at all from those clicks. They're here because knowing the cheapest legitimate price is the useful part, not because they pay.
What commissions do not influence
This is the part worth being specific about, because "we only recommend what we love" is easy to say and impossible to check.
Every game in the catalog is added, tagged and written up by hand. The ordering is an editorial popularity weight set by a person. No retailer pays for placement, no publisher has been given a listing, and nothing in the ranking logic knows or cares what a game's commission rate is — the code that sorts results has no access to pricing or payout data at all. Games are included because they're worth someone's evening, and the ones that would earn the most are not the ones at the top.
Commission rates on games and hardware are low enough that structuring recommendations around them would be a poor trade anyway. The catalog is the thing of value here; distorting it would spend the only asset the site has.
Prices and availability
PC prices are fetched live from CheapShark when you search, across 30+ digital stores. They change constantly and can be out of date by the time you click. Console prices aren't tracked. Always confirm the price on the retailer's own page before buying — the figure shown here is a signal, not a quote.
Independence
PlayNext is an independent project. It isn't affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Amazon, CheapShark, any storefront, any platform holder, or any publisher. All game names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.