PCZ is an independent PC gaming publication written in the irreverent spirit of PC ZONE magazine. We have opinions, we have standards, and we have a readership of engaged PC gamers who trust us precisely because we’re not for sale to the highest bidder. If you’re here because you want to work with us, read this page carefully. If you’re here to ask us to publish a sponsored post about CBD oil, online casinos, or cryptocurrency investment opportunities, please close the tab.
Advertise With PCZ
PCZ reaches an audience of dedicated PC gamers and tech enthusiasts who visit the site for honest, opinionated coverage of everything relevant to the platform they care about. Our readers understand hardware, follow games closely, and make informed purchasing decisions. They are not easily fooled and they notice immediately when a publication takes money to say things it doesn’t believe.
Which is why we don’t do that.
What We Offer
Display Advertising Banner and sidebar placements across the site, served to a PC gaming audience with genuine purchase intent. If you make a product our readers actually want — gaming peripherals, PC components, gaming monitors, relevant software, gaming chairs, storage, cooling, cases — we can put it in front of them.
Sponsored Content We will write about your product in our own voice, with our own opinions, and with full transparency that the content is sponsored. This means our readers will trust it because they trust us, which is considerably more valuable than content that looks sponsored because it reads like a press release. If your product is genuinely good, sponsored content on PCZ is worth having. If your product is not genuinely good, we will say so, because that is the arrangement.
Product Reviews We review hardware, peripherals, gaming accessories, and relevant software. Review coverage is editorially independent — we form our own conclusions regardless of whether the product was provided by the manufacturer. A review is not a guarantee of positive coverage. It is a guarantee of honest coverage, which is worth considerably more over time.
Newsletter and Social Amplification We can include your product, campaign, or announcement in our newsletter and social channels. Audience reach and current rate card available on request.
What We Don’t Accept
This section exists because it needs to.
PCZ does not accept advertising, sponsored content, or paid links from the following categories, regardless of the fee offered:
Gambling and betting sites. This is a gaming site. Our readers play games. They are not our mechanism for directing people toward online casinos, sports betting platforms, poker sites, or any other form of gambling promotion. The answer is no. It will always be no. A higher offer does not change the answer.
CBD, nootropics, and wellness products. We are not a wellness platform. We tried the nootropics content in 2017 and we’re still embarrassed about it.
Cryptocurrency and NFT projects. No. Our readers are smart enough to be deeply sceptical of this category and our association with it would cost us more in credibility than any fee would compensate.
VPN affiliate content. We wrote a Pokemon GO VPN article once. We unpublished it. That chapter is closed.
Generic SEO link insertion. If your email begins with “I noticed your site has great domain authority and I was wondering if you’d be interested in placing a link to our [unrelated website]” then the answer is no. If it begins with anything suggesting the link will be “naturally incorporated into existing content” or “barely noticeable,” the answer is also no, and additionally you should know that we find the phrasing somewhat insulting.
Adult content. No.
Financial products not relevant to gaming or PC hardware. No.
Any product we consider genuinely harmful to our audience. This category exists for things we haven’t thought of yet that are obviously wrong when they arrive.
Our Audience
PCZ attracts PC gamers, hardware enthusiasts, retro gaming fans, and readers who care about the history and culture of the platform. Our strongest content categories are gaming guides, tech opinion, hardware coverage, retro retrospectives, and long-form features. Our readership skews toward engaged, experienced gamers who have strong opinions about what they like and a healthy distrust of marketing.
To discuss advertising, rates, or content partnerships, email [email protected] with the subject line “Advertising Enquiry” and a description of your product or campaign.
Write For PCZ
PCZ publishes features, reviews, guides, opinion pieces, tech articles, and retro retrospectives. We have a voice and an editorial identity, and we are looking for writers who can contribute to it — not writers who can fill word counts.
This is the honest version of our contributor pitch, so let’s be straight with you from the start.
What We Can Offer
We are an independent publication and we cannot pay professional rates. What we can offer is a genuinely well-regarded platform with real readers, a high authority domain with years of PC gaming history behind it, editorial feedback that will make your writing better, a byline on articles that people actually read, and the specific satisfaction of being published somewhere that cares about quality.
If you are an experienced professional writer looking for a paid commission, we are probably not the right fit at this stage. If you are a knowledgeable PC gamer with a genuine voice and something worth saying, we are very much the right fit and we’d like to hear from you.
What We Cover
PCZ publishes in seven categories:
Features — Long-form, researched, argued pieces about PC gaming subjects that matter. Not summaries of news. Not listicles. Pieces that make a case, tell a story, or illuminate something worth knowing.
Reviews — Games, hardware, peripherals. PC-focused, clearly scored, written with genuine engagement with the subject rather than press release proximity. We score on a percentage basis.
Opinion — First-person argued pieces on industry trends, gaming culture, and anything else that deserves a strong take. Opinion pieces require an actual opinion, stated clearly, and defended coherently.
Guides — Practical, accurate, useful. Technical accuracy is non-negotiable. Guides that are wrong are worse than guides that don’t exist.
Tech — Hardware, components, the PC platform’s infrastructure. GPU analysis, CPU comparisons, monitor technology, peripherals. Technical depth is welcome. Technical inaccuracy is not.
Retro — Retrospectives, anniversary pieces, archive-informed features on the history of PC gaming. The more specific and personal the better. Generic “remember this game?” pieces are less interesting than pieces that have something to say about why a game mattered.
Zextras — The lighter section. Gaming culture oddities, amusing industry news, the kind of thing that made PC ZONE’s back pages worth reading. Funny is harder than serious. We notice the difference.
The PCZ Voice
PCZ is not a neutral publication. We have opinions, we express them clearly, and we write about PC gaming with a specific irreverent energy that reflects our roots as a tribute to PC ZONE magazine. If you’ve read the site, you know what the voice sounds like. If you haven’t read the site, please do so before pitching.
What the voice is: confident, specific, occasionally funny, always backed by genuine knowledge of the subject.
What the voice is not: corporate, hedged, generic, or written in the style of a press release about itself.
We do not publish content that reads as if it was written to fill a word count or satisfy an SEO brief. We publish content that reads as if a person who cares about the subject wrote it because they had something to say.
Editorial Standards
Accuracy. Every factual claim must be correct. We check. If we find an error after publication we will correct it and note the correction. If your pitch contains factual errors it will be returned. If your filed piece contains significant factual errors it will be returned for revision.
Originality. We publish original work. Content published elsewhere will not be accepted, including content previously published on personal blogs, Medium, or any other platform.
Transparency. If you have a commercial relationship with a product you are writing about, you must disclose it. We will decide whether the piece is still appropriate. Undisclosed commercial relationships in editorial content are a quick way to end a working relationship permanently.
Grammar and spelling. We edit, but we are not a corrections service. Submissions should be clean, proofed, and ready to publish with light editing rather than requiring significant structural repair.
Word counts. Features and reviews: 800 words minimum, no maximum if the subject justifies the length. Guides: as long as they need to be to be genuinely useful. Opinion pieces: 500 words minimum. News pieces: we no longer publish straight news, so don’t pitch those.
What to Pitch
The strongest pitches are specific. “I’d like to write about retro gaming” is not a pitch. “I’d like to write a retrospective on Deus Ex’s original marketing campaign and what it tells us about how the games industry talked about PC gaming in 2000” is a pitch.
Good subjects for PCZ in 2026:
- Retrospectives on significant PC games, developers, or periods in gaming history
- Opinion pieces on current industry trends with a clear, argued point of view
- Technical guides on PC gaming subjects where you have genuine expertise
- Reviews of PC games, hardware, or peripherals you have genuine experience with
- Features that use a current event or release as a springboard for a broader argument
Subjects we are unlikely to accept:
- Top ten listicles with no original argument
- Straight news recaps of things already widely covered
- Opinion pieces that don’t contain an opinion
- Anything about console gaming without a clear PC angle
- Anything we’ve published recently on the same subject
How to Pitch
Email [email protected] with the subject line “Contributor Pitch” and include:
- A one-paragraph description of your proposed article, including the argument or angle, the category it belongs in, and the approximate word count
- Two or three sentences about your PC gaming background and why you’re the right person to write this particular piece
- One writing sample — ideally published work, but unpublished samples are acceptable if they demonstrate the voice and standard we’re looking for
We read every pitch. We respond to the ones that are right for the site. We don’t respond to mass pitches that are clearly sent to fifty publications simultaneously, pitches for subjects outside our coverage, or pitches that demonstrate the sender hasn’t read the site.
If you haven’t heard back within two weeks, feel free to follow up once.
For all enquiries: [email protected]
PCZ is an independent, fan-led games and tech publication written in the irreverent spirit of PC ZONE magazine (1993-2010). We are not affiliated with Future Publishing.