What Visitors See When a Game Goes Away

Games leave the catalog. The Partner Terms say so openly: PlayKovo may add, change or remove any game at any time and without notice, for reasons such as an ended license, a developer withdrawing, a complaint, a failed quality or safety check or technical reasons, and embed addresses may stop working. So your site needs a plan for the moment a visitor opens a page whose game is gone. This post describes what that plan looks like.

Case	What happens	What you do
The game was removed from the catalog	It disappears from the feed; the embed address may stop working	Retire or replace the page; your regular feed check finds it
PlayKovo asks you to remove a game	You must remove it within three business days, or sooner for a legal or safety reason	Remove the page or embed quickly; see takedowns
A temporary technical problem	The frame fails to load for a while	Show a friendly message; do not delete anything

The difference matters. Removing a page because of a one-hour problem would throw away a page that is fine. Keeping a page whose game is gone leaves visitors on a dead end.

The terms tell you to review the feed regularly and remove games that no longer appear in it. Make this automatic. Each time your sync runs, compare the slugs you have with the slugs in the feed and mark missing ones. The code idea is in caching the feed and removing dead games. Note that the feed is cached for five minutes, so a game can be gone a few minutes before your copy shows it; that gap is normal.

One safety measure: do not delete a game after one failed sync. A network error or an empty response should not wipe your catalog. Require the game to be missing from a good response, and consider waiting for two syncs in a row.

If someone opens a page for a game that has left, they should see:

• A clear message: "This game is no longer available."
• Links to similar games in the same category.
• Your site's normal navigation.

They should not see an empty frame, a browser error or a cryptic message. For the HTTP side, choose with search engines in mind:

Situation	Response
A close replacement exists	A permanent redirect to that page
Only a category of similar games exists	A redirect to the category page, if it truly matches
Nothing relevant	A "gone" or "not found" status with a helpful page

Do not redirect everything to the home page. It misleads search engines and frustrates visitors.

• Remove the game from category pages, "related games" lists and "new this week" blocks.
• Remove its page from your sitemap.
• Delete stored images and descriptions for it that you no longer need, as the terms limit the use of feed data to games you embed.
• Update internal links that point to the page.

A removal is also a chance. Look at the weekly additions and pick a game with a similar genre and device support. See keeping a game section fresh. If you rewrote the page with your own text, the new game needs its own text; do not reuse words that describe a different game.

Create a "game unavailable" template once and use it everywhere. A shared component that checks a flag is easier to keep correct than special cases on each page. Test it by marking a game as removed on a staging copy of your site and loading its page.

If PlayKovo tells you there is a legal or safety reason for removal, act at once rather than at the end of the period. Keep the message. If you are removed from the program altogether, follow the seven-day plan. The terms are at playkovo.com/partners/terms.