About
About OFFLANE
The Off-Lane of Gaming. Built by players, for players.
What this site is
OFFLANE is a free-to-play gaming media site. We cover news, reviews, guides, deals, patch notes, tier lists, and long-form editorial for the F2P games you actually play — Apex Legends, Counter-Strike 2, League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, Overwatch 2, Fortnite, and a dozen more. Everything is written by one editor (me) and a rotating set of AI-assisted content tools.
The site is a static exportbuilt with Next.js and deployed to Cloudflare Pages. There’s no server, no database, no Workers for page views. Every article is a pre-rendered HTML file. The build is fast and the site is free to run.
How OFFLANE makes money
OFFLANE is reader-supported. Three revenue sources, all disclosed:
- Affiliate links — when you click a deal link and buy a game, we may earn a commission. The programs are Steam (5% revenue share), Epic Games (5%), and Amazon Associates (1-4%). We only link to games we’d recommend anyway. The commission doesn’t change our review or recommendation.
- Display ads — we run Carbon Ads when the site has enough traffic to be approved. Carbon Ads is a clean, no-tracker ad network that pays per impression. Until then, the ad slots show “house ads” promoting our own content (newsletter, deals, tier lists). Every sponsored slot is labeled.
- Newsletter sponsorship(future) — when the newsletter has enough subscribers, we’ll run one sponsored mention per week. The sponsor will never be a casino, a crypto/NFT, or a game we’ve given a negative review.
What we never do: sponsored reviews, paid placement of games in tier lists, commission-based editorial coverage, undisclosed affiliate links, or ads that target users based on personal data.
Editorial standards
- Every review includes a score (0-10) and a verdict (must-play, recommended, good, mixed, avoid). The score is the editor’s, not a composite of other outlets.
- Every news article is dated. Articles more than 6 months old are updated or marked as “archived” rather than left to rot.
- Every tier list includes a one-line rationale for each tier. A tier list without tier rationale is a list of opinions, not a ranking.
- Every guide is tested. If we recommend a build, we’ve used it. If we recommend a strategy, we’ve run it.
- Every deal link is checked for current price and validity. Dead links are removed within 24 hours of being reported.
Who writes this
I’m the editor and the only full-time writer. AI-assisted content tools help with first drafts, fact-checking, and SEO-optimized summaries, but every article is reviewed, edited, and signed off by a human before it ships.
For corrections, tips, or press inquiries, get in touch.
The technical bits
- Stack: Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19, TypeScript 5, Tailwind CSS v4, Framer Motion.
- CMS: None. Articles are Markdown files in
content/, committed to the same Git repo as the site. Frontmatter is validated at build time. - Data pipeline: A scheduled GitHub Action pulls from 8+ third-party APIs (Steam, Epic, CheapShark, F2P catalog, LoL, Dota, etc.) and commits the results to
data/external/. No runtime API calls. - Search: Pagefind, a static, build-time search index. No server, no index API costs.
- Hosting: Cloudflare Pages free tier. Static assets only. The only Worker is the newsletter signup function (one HTTP request per signup, negligible cost).