About PocketGamer.org

PocketGamer.org publishes practical answers for people who play games. Not reviews, not news, not scores: the questions that come up while you are actually playing, or standing in a shop, or looking at a settings menu, and that nobody has answered plainly.

What the magazine covers

Seven departments, and between them they take in every platform: handhelds and hardware, PC and console, mobile and streaming, retro and emulation, competitive play, the business behind games, and a guides section for the procedures that cross all of them.

• Hardware — screens, controllers, batteries and the parts that wear out first.
• PC & Console — settings, bottlenecks and the measurements that decide how a game runs.
• Mobile — phones, streaming, and what a connection has to deliver.
• Retro — old machines, emulators, and rescuing what is stored on hardware that is failing.
• Competitive — latency, ranking systems and what competing costs.
• The Business — business models, delays, early access, and what happens when a server is switched off.
• Guides — check before you buy, claim a refund, lock a console down.

How an article is built

Every piece states the question in the reader's own words, explains the mechanism behind it, and ends with something you can do: a check, a measurement, an order of operations. Figures are attributed to the source they came from. Where a number could not be established, the article says so and shows you how to measure the thing on your own hardware instead. There are no scores anywhere on this site, and no article recommends a product by model name. The reasoning is set out in how we work.

The archive

This domain began in 2001 as a magazine about games on Pocket PC hardware, run by a single editor with a great deal of help from readers who sent in news, reviews and corrections. It covered emulators, the first handheld ports of arcade games, and a scene that has since disappeared almost entirely from the web.

None of that material has been deleted or rewritten. The newsdesk, the feature articles, the link directory and the Pocket Millionaire quiz software are all at the addresses they have always had, and they are indexed in the archive. They are marked as archive pages so that nobody mistakes a page written in 2001 for current advice. The present magazine is a different operation from the one that wrote them.

What we do not do

PocketGamer does not sell, rent, repair or distribute hardware or software, does not run a shop, and earns nothing from anything you buy. It does not operate a test laboratory and never claims benchmark results of its own.

The domain does carry paid placements — a strip of link partners on the front page, and a set of commissioned articles filed in the international section of the archive. Both are labelled wherever they appear. If you want to place something here, the terms are on the write for us page.