Never Pay To Play

Somewhere along the way, playing a game stopped being a thing you did and started being a thing you bought, repeatedly, in small amounts, for ever.

It happens by degrees. The game is free. Then there is a currency. Then there are two currencies, and one of them can only be bought. Then there is a timer that can be skipped for a small fee, and a chest that might contain the thing you want, and a season that ends on Thursday whether you are ready or not. None of it is an accident. All of it is designed, tested, and tuned by people who are extremely good at their jobs.

The people it works best on are the people least equipped to see it happening.

What we are actually objecting to

Not paying for things. Paying for a game is fine — it always was. A developer makes something, you buy it, it is yours. That is a clean trade and nobody is confused about what just happened.

What we object to is the machinery that replaced it:

• Randomised rewards sold for money. A loot box is a bet. You pay, you do not know what you get, and the thing you wanted is rare on purpose. The UK government ran a call for evidence on loot boxes and concluded they should be dealt with through industry measures rather than brought under the Gambling Act — which is to say the mechanic is still there, in games played by children, every day.
• Pay-to-win. A game where money substitutes for skill is not a game. It is a leaderboard of who spent most, wearing a game as a costume.
• Manufactured urgency. Limited-time, ends-tonight, miss-it-and-it-is-gone. Pressure tactics that would be called out instantly on a shop floor pass without comment when there is a cartoon character delivering them.
• Gambling adverts in and around games children play. Free spins, odds boosts, welcome offers. Served next to things made for ten-year-olds, and normalised by sheer repetition.

And it runs the other way too

While games were learning from gambling, gambling was learning from games — and it has been the faster student.

Open a betting app now and it does not look like a bookmaker. It looks like a game. There is a level and a progress bar. There are daily missions and a streak you will lose if you do not come back tomorrow. There are tokens, free spins awarded for activity rather than for staking, a wheel to spin, a mystery bonus to reveal, a leaderboard, a tier you can climb to unlock a better one. The language is achievements and rewards. The visual grammar is lifted wholesale from mobile gaming, because that grammar is what a generation grew up reading.

What it does is blur the line until there is no line. A child who has spent three years opening chests in a game recognises every one of those mechanics on sight, and recognises none of them as betting. The skills transfer; the warning does not. By the time the mechanics are attached to real money, they have been made to feel like play.

This is the bit we find hardest to be calm about. It is one thing to design a game that takes money from adults who can see it coming. It is another to spend a decade teaching children the exact interface language of a gambling product, and then put a gambling product behind it.

The common thread is not the money. It is that the game is no longer on your side. Every one of those mechanics works by making the experience slightly worse until you pay to make it better again. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

So: never pay to play

Quizmondo is a quiz site. You can play every part of it, right now, without paying anybody anything. That is not a trial, a tier or a tactic. It is the product.

Specifically, and permanently:

• Nothing to buy. No passes, chests, boosters, lives, continues or paid currency. Nothing is withheld from you and then sold back.
• No loot boxes, and nothing that behaves like one. No paid randomised rewards of any kind.
• No pay-to-win. Every player sits down to the same questions with the same clock. The leaderboard measures what you know and how fast you knew it.
• No gambling advertising. Ever. Not a banner, not a sponsorship, not a tie-in, whatever the offer. This is the one we get asked about most, and it is the easiest to answer.
• No adult, alcohol, vaping, dating or weight-loss advertising either. A site that children use is a site that children use.
• No app store, no download, no account required to play. Open it and go. An account saves your scores; it is not a toll gate.

Nobody has to take that on trust. Open any game on this site and count the buttons that ask you for money. The number is zero, and it stays zero.

Coins, and which way they point

Quizmondo has coins. They matter enough to be clear about, because a currency is exactly the thing this page has spent several paragraphs objecting to — so here is the difference, and it is the whole difference.

You earn coins by playing. You cannot buy them. Not now, not later, not for any amount of money. There is no top-up, no bundle, no "best value" pack. The only way to hold a hundred coins is to have played well enough to be given a hundred coins.

And they are going to be worth something. When our store opens, coins will be redeemable against real items in it, and against credit with partner sites we work with. Not another cosmetic to show off inside the game that gave it to you — actual things, which is the point of a reward.

So the arrow points the other way round from everywhere else. On most sites, money flows from the player into the game, and the "rewards" exist to pull more of it through. Here, value flows out to the player, paid for by advertising, in return for nothing but their attention and their general knowledge. That is what we think a free game is supposed to be.

How it is paid for, honestly

Running a site costs money, and anyone who tells you otherwise is about to explain their crypto token. Quizmondo is paid for by advertising — ordinary, visible, clearly labelled advertising, of the sort that has funded free things since long before any of this started.

We hold ourselves to rules about it:

• Every ad is reviewed by a person before it runs. Not a filter, not a network's category list — a human being who has looked at the creative and the page it leads to and signed it off as suitable for all ages.
• Every ad is labelled as an ad. Nothing is dressed up as part of the site. If it is paid for, it says so.
• Nobody is profiled. Advertising here is not personalised. We do not build a picture of a player to sell against, and we are not interested in starting. The Information Commissioner's Children's Code expects profiling-based advertising to be off by default for children; ours is off for everybody.
• An impression means somebody saw it. We count an ad as seen when it has genuinely been on screen, not when the page containing it was sent. It is a smaller number than the industry norm and it is the true one.

If you are a brand reading this

You have probably been sent this page by us, so let us be direct about what is on offer.

Quizmondo is a British quiz and trivia site with a family audience: pub quiz leagues playing in real venues, daily puzzles, head-to-head duels and mini games. People come back because the quiz is good, not because a streak is about to expire.

What a placement here gets you:

• Genuine brand safety, not a checkbox. Your banner will not appear next to a betting offer, because there are no betting offers. It will not appear next to user-generated content nobody has read, because there is none in the ad slots. Every neighbour your ad has was approved by hand.
• A context people chose to be in. Someone answering quiz questions is awake, engaged and not scrolling past. That is a rarer commodity than reach.
• Formats that are not hostile. Banners, in-feed placements, and video that never autoplays with sound. Nothing interrupts a round in progress.
• Honest reporting. Viewable impressions, clicks, click rate, day by day. If a campaign underperforms you will see it here first, from us.
• Local as well as national. A venue advertising its Thursday quiz night and a national brand sit in the same system, on the same terms.
• A reward loop you can sit inside. Players earn coins by playing, and those coins will be redeemable in our store and against credit with partner sites. If you would rather reach people through what they can win than through a banner, there is a conversation to have about that.

We are a particularly good fit if your brand has its own reasons to avoid gambling adjacency — sportswear, consoles and games, hosting and tech, universities and colleges, local authorities, libraries, charities and public health campaigns. If your media buying has a "no gambling, no alcohol, nothing near children" line in it, this site was built to that line from the first day.

The short version

Too many games are now built to take money from people a little at a time, and they work best on the people who can least afford it and least see it coming. We think that is a rotten way to treat players, and a worse way to treat children.

So: never pay to play. Not here.

If you want to advertise alongside that, or you are a venue who wants a quiz night on the site, get in touch through the contact page and we will talk about it properly.