Quick answer: To start a gaming blog in 2026, pick one game, genre or scene you already play. Write twenty searchable posts about it before you spend a penny on design, and treat WordPress on cheap hosting as a solved problem. Before writing this guide we read all seven organic results on Google’s first page for this exact question. Three were published by companies selling the platform, hosting or theme they recommend. The number one result is a Reddit thread posted eight years ago. This is the guide we went looking for and did not find.
Original check. Google US results for three phrasings of this question, personalisation off, harvested 2 September 2026. Every page discussed below was opened and read.
The numbers, up front
- The number one organic result for “how to start a gaming blog” is a Reddit thread posted eight years ago. The same thread tops the organic results for all three phrasings we checked.
- 3 of the 7 page-one guides are published by companies selling the thing they recommend: a website builder, a web host and a theme shop.
- 2 of the 7 are written by people who run a gaming blog. One of those two pages is a sales page for a paid starter kit.
- One page-one guide was published in October 2013 and still ranks today.
- The theme vendor on page one also holds two of the four video slots on the same results page, and the website builder holds a sponsored slot as well as its organic one.
- Meanwhile the professional end of the niche is shrinking: Vox Media sold Polygon to Valnet in May 2025 with some staff moved and others laid off, after The Washington Post and Vice had already closed their gaming sections.
Who is teaching you to start a gaming blog?
We ran the question through Google in the United States with personalisation switched off, on 2 September 2026, in three phrasings: “how to start a gaming blog”, “start a gaming blog” and “how to start a video game blog”. Then we opened every organic result on page one and asked two things. Who publishes this, and what do they sell?
| Rank | Page | Who wrote it | What they sell |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reddit thread, r/GirlGamers | Forum posters, eight years ago | Nothing |
| 2 | Wix guide | Wix staff | Wix, which the guide recommends |
| 3 | Game Developer, “4 Tips” | A byline from 2013 listed simply as “Blogger” | Nothing. The post predates the PS4 |
| 4 | Mithrie’s 13-year journey | A gaming creator publishing since 2013 | Runs ads and disclosed affiliate links on his own gaming site |
| 5 | Her Cozy Gaming starter kit page | A cozy-gaming blogger since 2022 | Her own paid PDF starter kit. The ranking page is the sales page |
| 6 | YouStable guide | A web hosting company | Hosting. The guide names the company 15 times |
| 7 | RadiusTheme guide | A WordPress theme shop | Its own gaming theme and grid plugin, both recommended in the guide |
Shovel content: how-to advice published by the company that sells the tools it recommends. In a gold rush, sell shovels. In a blogging niche, sell the theme, the host and the builder to people who have not written a post yet. The tell is that the guide spends more words on setup than on the writing, because setup is where the checkout link lives. A blogger selling her own starter kit is playing a different game: she profits from the advice too, but she has used the shovel.
This is not unique to gaming. When we followed every link on 40 “best blogging tools” pages for our Stake Test study, 80 percent of them either earned a commission on their picks or were published by a vendor recommending its own product. The gaming version is just easier to see, because the two pages written by working gaming bloggers sit directly beside the three written by vendors, and they give different advice. The vendor guides deal with niche selection in a single early step, then devote most of their remaining steps to domains, hosting tiers, themes and plugins. Mithrie’s guide barely mentions tools. He has been publishing since 2013, and his advice is to play what you write about, use your own screenshots, answer questions directly, and treat standard platforms as fine. No vendor guide says anything that plain.
The honest state of the niche
Two things are true at once about gaming content in 2026, and a useful guide has to hold both.
The first is that professional games media has been contracting for years. Vox Media sold Polygon to Valnet in May 2025, with some staff moved and others laid off. The same report notes that The Washington Post’s Launcher and Vice’s Waypoint had already been shut down by their owners. If newsrooms with salaried critics could not make general games coverage pay, a new blog covering “gaming” at large is walking into the same wall with fewer weapons. Do not build a small IGN.
The second is what our results page shows: for the queries a gaming blogger would target, Google is filling page one with an eight-year-old forum thread, a twelve-year-old listicle and three vendor brochures. Our Reddit Tax study found Reddit on page one for 30 out of 30 blogging queries and in the number one slot for 19 of them. The gaming SERPs we pulled fit that pattern: the same Reddit thread holds the top organic slot across every phrasing. Part of that is Google’s general tilt toward forums. The rest is an indictment, because none of the purpose-written guides has managed to beat an unedited conversation from eight years ago. That is a weak field, and weak fields are rare.
So the niche is hostile to generalists and open to specialists. The professional contraction cleared out exactly the coverage that never paid: broad news, review-everything schedules, E3-style event churn. What it did not touch is the long tail of specific questions players type while stuck, and those queries are answered today by Reddit threads of wildly uneven quality. A blog that answers them properly is competing with a forum, and a forum on a bad day.
What still works: pick a beat, not a niche
“Pick a niche” is the first step in every vendor guide, and as written it is too loose to help. A niche is “RPGs”. A beat is the thing a reporter owns: one game, one genre corner or one scene, small enough that you can realistically become one of the better-informed people writing about it in English.
Some shapes fit a one-person blog well. A single live-service game’s builds, patches and economy, where every update resets the meta and the search demand. One genre corner you already live in, like cozy sims, boomer shooters or CRPGs. A platform scene: retro handhelds, emulation on a specific device, Steam Deck settings for demanding games. A modding community, where the documentation is scattered across Discord servers. Or the hardware end, controllers, sim rigs and accessibility setups, where the affiliate money is real.
The test for a beat is blunt: write down 50 post titles someone would search for. If you cannot, the beat is too thin or you do not know it well enough yet. If you can, notice how many of those 50 are currently answered by a Reddit thread. That number is your opportunity.
One rule from the working bloggers on page one is worth stealing outright. Mithrie’s first principle is to play what you write about and use your own screenshots. Our research on tool reviews found that 38 percent of page-one reviewers could not demonstrate real use of the product they reviewed; in gaming the reader can smell it instantly, because anyone who has played the game knows what the wiki paraphrase sounds like. Your screenshots, your clear times, your failed builds are the moat. A vendor guide cannot tell you this, because it works whether or not you buy anything.
Setting it up, in one paragraph instead of three thousand words
Here is the part the shovel sellers stretch into ten steps. Buy a domain with your blog’s name (our naming rules apply to gaming names too: pronounceable, no trademarked game names in the domain). Put WordPress on inexpensive shared hosting; WordPress runs 40.7 percent of all websites as of 1 September 2026, and every question you will ever have about it is already answered. Install a fast, readable theme, and note that you do not need a “gaming theme” with neon accents and a grid plugin; the only people who say you do are selling one. If you want the full mechanical walkthrough, our main guide to starting a blog covers it. If you want to spend nothing while you find out whether you enjoy this, starting free is a legitimate route. Just understand the wordpress.com and wordpress.org difference before you pick.
Then write. Twenty posts on one beat before you touch the design again. Twenty is not a magic number, but it is roughly where you discover whether the beat has legs and whether you enjoy writing about games at all, which no amount of theme shopping will reveal. Publish guides with the answer in the first paragraph, dated, with your own captures. Distribution in gaming happens where gamers already talk: the subreddits and Discords for your beat. Both punish drive-by self-promotion, so be a known member who sometimes links a guide worth linking, and let the guide carry your name.
How much money do gaming blogs make?
The most credible public numbers on page one come from the two working bloggers, and they are modest. Wendy England of Her Cozy Gaming, who started in January 2022, says on her own sales page that traffic took three months, monetisation took twelve, her first ad network acceptance came in January 2023, and the blog now makes over 1,000 pounds a month. Mithrie’s site runs AdSense and disclosed affiliate links to games stores. Neither claims a salary. Treat those as the realistic bright cases: dated, specific and published under a real name, which is more than any vendor guide offers.
The mechanics are the same as any content niche. Display ads need serious traffic before the better networks accept you. Affiliate works best at the hardware end of a beat, where purchase intent is real, and every recommendation should be disclosed. A paid product of your own, the route Her Cozy Gaming took, only works after the audience exists. If money is the main goal, read our breakdown of which kinds of blogs make money before committing to gaming, because gaming monetises worse per reader than finance or software. Start a gaming blog because you already play the games and want the beat; the money, if it comes, follows the archive.
How we checked, and the limits
This is one query family, pulled once, on one day, from the United States, with personalisation off. Google reshuffles results constantly, so the page one you see may differ from the one we harvested. We opened and read every organic result we counted, and every claim above about a specific page links to that page. On our own stake: Blogging Titan sells audits and services aimed at established blogs, linked from our navigation, and nothing on this page is an affiliate link. We have no relationship with any site named above.
Published September 2026. SERP data harvested 2 September 2026.
Keep reading
- How to Start a Blog in 2026, the full setup walkthrough this guide compresses.
- How to Start a Blog for Free, and when free is enough.
- The Reddit Tax, our study of how much of page one Reddit now holds.
- The Stake Test, on who profits from the advice that ranks.
- The rest of this series: food, fitness and personal finance blog guides, each with its own page-one census.
Frequently asked questions
Is starting a gaming blog worth it in 2026?
Yes, with a narrow scope and honest expectations. General gaming coverage is the ground where salaried newsrooms have been sold or shut, so avoid it. A tightly scoped beat with searchable evergreen guides competes mostly with old Reddit threads, and the two working gaming bloggers on page one for this query both built their audiences on specific, searchable coverage.
How much does it cost to start a gaming blog?
Under 100 dollars for the first year in the paid route: a domain plus shared hosting on introductory pricing. The free route costs nothing and is fine for finding out whether you enjoy the work. The expensive-sounding parts of vendor guides, premium gaming themes and page builder addons, are optional purchases from the companies writing those guides.
Should I start a gaming blog or a YouTube channel?
They answer different queries. Video wins for anything watched, like gameplay, reactions and reviews of feel. Text wins for anything searched mid-task: settings, fixes, builds, locations and comparisons, where a reader wants the answer in ten seconds without scrubbing a timeline. A blog also gives you an asset you own outright. Several successful gaming creators run both and let each format take the queries it serves best.
How long does it take a gaming blog to make money?
The only dated public timeline on page one for this query comes from Her Cozy Gaming: three months to meaningful traffic, twelve months to monetisation, with an ad network acceptance after year one and over 1,000 pounds a month reported after that. Faster is possible with hardware affiliate content, but plan in years.
What should my first posts be about?
Questions players in your beat search while stuck, that currently resolve to a forum thread. Patch explainers, build guides, settings for specific hardware, fix-it posts and honest long-term reviews of games you have finished. Lead every post with the answer, date it, and use your own screenshots as proof you played.
Written by
Blogging Titan Team
Blogging Titan is an independent team of bloggers documenting what actually grows a blog in the AI search era. We have been building, ranking, and monetizing WordPress sites since 2017, and every guide on this site is based on strategies and tools we have tested ourselves. Want a second pair of eyes on your blog? Request a free blog audit or start with the 2026 playbook.