Review Policies, Scoring, and Ethics

Reviews

Reviews are the bread and butter of what developers are hoping for. They want nice high scores and some sites give in to developer or publisher pressure, or compensation, to make sure that the game is reviewed well and scored highly. These aren’t those reviews. Reviews are meant to be a critical and informed evaluation of a game to help you, the reader, make informed buying decisions. Developers put lots of time into these games and deserve honest review.

Scoring

Scoring is done on a scale ranging from 0 to 10, with .5 increments in between. To score a game, we require that the reviewer spend a substantial amount of time with the title to get a proper feel for it. None of this play for an hour and call it terrible stuff. Once played, the writing of the review can begin. This is designed to be a thought out process that analyzes the game in many various areas. Once written, the review gets reviewed by our editor(s) to make sure that there are no grammatical mistakes, things like that. The review is then assigned a score by the author and it is sent to be published on the site. The score is only assigned after the entire review has been written and the author has had enough time to make a proper determination. By the time you read the review, the score at the bottom shouldn’t surprise you as hopefully our reviewer has given ample reason for it.

Ethics

We do not discuss our reviews or scores with publishers or developers prior to their release.

Unless noted otherwise, no member of our staff covers companies that they have a financial investment in, are employed by, or employ a person close to them.

We do not pay sources and we protect the identity of our sources.

Any story or review found inaccurate may be corrected.

Advertisers do not influence what we cover or review.

If we have a giveaway or contest, we will do our absolute best to make it fair and have rules stated clearly.

If a member of our staff appears in a professional capacity on television, news, or other media, it is not as an endorsement of any products, companies, or services.

Companies may send us copies of games or merchandise. We do not have agreements with any of these companies stating that if they send us items that we will write about them or try to portray things in a different light.

A company may ask us to wait to publish a review until the release of their product, and we think that’s pretty fair.

If we decide we want to review something and a company has not provided us with a copy, we may purchase a copy for the team.