I am publishing this on April 1st, but this is not an April Fools post. Honestly, you do not need any added confusion or drama in your life right now. Nobody does.

So here is the real story instead. It’s better than the joke.

We Made Some Games. No, Really.

We have actually been making games. You can check them out at nuggetgames.io. They are small, simple things. They are the kind of stuff we might have built as April Fools jokes in past years. (Hi, Nugget!) But back then, we could never justify spending development time on side projects when our core focus was building and maintaining the Paid Memberships Pro platform.

So what changed? The tools changed.

AI-powered coding tools make it possible to sketch an idea, type it to an agent, and get a working prototype for a game, all while doing your day job. These games are not a distraction from PMPro. They are proof that the same tools making us faster at our real work also leave room for creative experiments on the side.

What These Tools Actually Do for PMPro

Beyond making games for fun, we have been using AI tools to power up every part of how we build and ship PMPro. We have incorporated AI agents and review into our development, marketing, and support. All of it.

We are pushing more updates than ever, faster than ever, and at higher quality than ever. But I want to be clear about what that means. We are not using these tools to crank out code and content you do not need. We are using them to do better research into what our users actually need. We are using them to review and improve the quality of everything we put out.

The result: we are not just shipping bug fixes. We are pushing new features, enhancements, and more Add On updates than we have in years. And we’re just getting started.

You Are Feeling This Shift Too

The emergence of powerful AI tools is not just changing how we work. It is changing how you work. You might be using ChatGPT or Claude to plan and write content. You may have noticed updates to WordPress that enable AI-powered tools in the dashboard and the ability to manage your site through AI agents.

There are a lot of options out there, and for each option, a lot of ways to use it. It can be overwhelming. We are working on the bleeding edge of this technology, and like everything we have done at PMPro, we are figuring out the best approaches for ourselves first and then sharing what we learn with our users.

A Lot of Disruption, Not a Lot of Clarity

AI is only one of the forces reshaping our world right now. We are also living through global economic upheaval. We are living through tariff battles, geopolitical conflict, real uncertainty that affects real people. I do not want to make light of any of it. The most profound impact is always on the people directly involved. But these forces also disrupt our businesses, our profits, our plans, and frankly, our ability to focus.

Then there is disruption in our corner of the WordPress ecosystem. Some of the larger companies in our space (companies that run competitors to PMPro) are struggling. They are laying people off. They are not shipping as fast. Some are being pulled toward more profitable markets or narrowing their focus to only their biggest, most lucrative customers.

We Are Going the Other Direction

We are committed to serving small and medium-sized membership sites. That has always been our passion: helping individuals and organizations get paid to support their lives and goals. Our mission is to help as many people and organizations as possible to do that.

Our business is more profitable than ever. We have more capability than ever. We are in a better position than ever to serve that mission. And we are using these new tools to do it.

In a world where costs keep rising and it feels like every service wants to give you less for more money, we are working to give you more.

That is why we built our own hosting platform. We have built our own caching, optimization, and transactional email tools. We have our sights set on handling as much of the technology stack as possible for our customers. We are not distracted by shiny objects. We genuinely enjoy doing this work. The best way to take care of our customers is to be the ones actually building the tools and services they need.

What’s Next?

So no, we are not pivoting to video games. In fact, we are working on our biggest product launch since we launched PMPro Plus 10 years ago. We are putting together the last bit of work to make the onboarding as seamless (and fun!) as possible. We are working out the details to make this a valuable offer to both new and existing customers of all kinds. We are excited to share this with you over the coming weeks.

Stay tuned to the blog. Make sure you are subscribed to our newsletter. We will have more information rolling out over the next two weeks.