We truly value each and every one of you in our community. It's your passion, creativity, and love for games that make Game Jolt such an incredible place. Your creations and your engagement breathe life into our platform every single day.

Recently, you may have noticed an increase in ads across our platform. While we understand this may be surprising and not everyone's favorite, we want to assure you that this decision was made after careful consideration. 

Our primary goal is to create an environment where our talented creators can thrive. Ads allow us to generate income that will directly go back to our creators. This way, we can help support them better, and they can continue creating games and content you all love.

At Game Jolt, inclusivity is a core value we hold dear. We believe that anyone can become a creator, and while we do have some requirements, they are attainable as long as you are actively contributing to the realms and communities, and interacting with others.

Other platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, Twitch and Fandom, show numerous ads and link to game downloads on Game Jolt. In fact, almost all platforms that lead to Game Jolt, monetize their traffic by showing ads–leaving us to bear the burden of paying the high bandwidth and data storage costs.

For example, when Markiplier uploads a video to YouTube playing a fangame hosted on Game Jolt, YouTube displays ads on the page as well as within Markiplier's video. This allows both YouTube and Markiplier to earn revenue while directing the data storage and bandwidth costs of the game for Game Jolt to pay. 

Not monetizing these costs become a drain on our creator fund which limits our ability to support creators. Showing ads on Game Jolt ensures a sustainable environment for all creators and their creations.

It's important to note that we do not monetize the games themselves. There are no ads within fangames, ensuring that your experience remains uninterrupted while playing them. We are the platform to host and discover fangames, similar to how the app stores display ads while browsing and viewing app pages.

You might be worried about losing access to your favorite fangames, and that's a valid concern despite having ads on our platform. Some companies, like Nintendo, have a preference to remove their content from certain platforms but not others. In the past, when Nintendo decided to remove fangames, they did it in bulk–regardless of whether the game pages showed ads or not. If showing ads was the issue, we wouldn't find Nintendo fan content on any platform. While this is not something we can control, we continue to urge our creators to respect Intellectual Property rights and to be aware of the possible consequences of infringement.

With that said, in some cases we have permission from the IP holder to host fangames. For example, the creators behind Five Nights at Freddy's, Undertale, etc. encourage fangames. We are not selling these fangames or directly monetizing the intellectual property by taking money from users. Showing ads on all pages, regardless of the content, is a fair approach that ensures we do not selectively monetize fan content or any specific type of content. 

We're navigating these changes together, and our commitment to you remains the same - we want to make Game Jolt a space where everyone can enjoy games and express their creativity. We're here to support and guide you through this, and we'll do everything in our power to keep your favorite content accessible.

Thank you for being a part of this wonderful community.

We love you,

The Game Jolt Team