Penny Arcade aims to go ad-free with Kickstarter campaign: "We want to sell out to you"

Penny Arcade have launched a Kickstarter campaign to rid themselves of all reliance on advertisers. Their aim is to crowdsource enough cash to replace revenue earned selling page space. "We had assumed it wasn't possible to do it that way anymore - to operate a site at this scale without advertising dollars - but it occurred to us that we'd never actually asked," they say.

This is their plan. They've thrown down an open hat in the form of this Kickstarter pledge page . Anyone can throw in a dollar or more. If they hit $525,000 ads will disappear from the home page. If they hit $999.999, the whole site will run without ads. There are incremental targets that will unlock as-yet-unrevealed rewards along the way.

In a blog post on PA , Mike "Gabe" Krahulik frames the kickstarter drive as a return to the years that PA ran on audience donations after falling foul of "a shady internet aggregator"

"Back then we considered it begging but today it's called crowd funding. I don't want you to get the idea that Penny Arcade is any kind of trouble. Honestly if this Kickstarter doesn't work nothing here will change. The reality is that we can continue working for advertisers but if we can, we'd rather work for you."

Here's a video outlining the scheme, which is worth watching for the moment that Jerry "Tycho" Holkins choke slams Yoshi. Below that, there's a roadmap detailing the milestones that they're hoping to hit over the course of the next 36 days. $21,774 have already been donated.

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.