Editorial standards

Most of what goes wrong in games coverage goes wrong quietly: a claim copied from another site, a date bumped to look fresh, a ranking with no reasoning behind it. These standards exist to make those specific things hard to do here.

Sources

• A factual claim about a game — an update, a feature, a store listing, a shutdown — is sourced to a primary source: the developer, the publisher, the official patch notes, or the store page itself.
• News and patch-note articles cannot be published without at least one source. This is enforced by the build, not by memory.
• Where we link a source, we record the date we opened it, because pages change.
• We do not cite another outlet's article as evidence for a claim about a game. If they have it and we cannot confirm it, we do not have it.

Firsthand testing

Where an article depends on having played something, a named person played it and the article says so. We do not describe an experience we have not had. Reviews carry the device, operating system version, playtime and spending — see the review policy.

Where an article does not depend on firsthand play — an explanation of a system, a method for making a decision — it is published under the shared editorial team byline and does not pretend otherwise.

Screenshots and images

• We do not scrape, hotlink or reuse game artwork we have no licence for.
• An image is only credited to PhonePlayers if a person here actually captured it.
• Every image carries alt text, dimensions and a credit. The build rejects an image without alt text.
• Where we have no image we can use honestly, the page is designed to work without one rather than filling the space with a stock photo of somebody holding a phone.

Dates and updates

Three dates can appear on an article and they mean different things. Published is when it first went live. Updated appears only when the article materially changed. Checked appears when a person re-verified the facts and changed nothing.

Conflicts of interest

• PhonePlayers shares ownership with Clashest, Brawlest, Bloxism and Pokémonism. Every card linking to them says so, on every page it appears.
• No publisher has supplied review access, hardware, currency or payment for anything currently published. If one does, the article will say so at the top.
• There are no affiliate relationships in place today. See the affiliate disclosure.
• Author-level disclosures are on each author profile.

Live-service coverage

Games that change weekly are the hardest thing to write about honestly, because an article is accurate for a fortnight and wrong forever after. Our response is to write about what does not change — how to decide, how to read an update, what a system is for — and to point at the specialized products for the numbers that move.

What we will not publish

• Rewritten app-store descriptions.
• Code lists we have not verified ourselves.
• Tier lists generated without a person reasoning about each placement.
• Invented firsthand experience, playtime, spending or device testing.
• Sensational claims about free currency, or anything framed to encourage a child to spend money.
• Gambling-style presentation around gacha and loot box mechanics.
• Hundreds of thin pages for games nobody maintains any more.