How we work

PocketGamer.org answers practical questions about playing games. Every article is built the same way: state the question in the reader's own words, explain the mechanism behind it, and finish with something the reader can actually do — a check, a measurement, an order of operations.

Where the numbers come from

Figures are attributed in the text to the source they came from, with the date of that source. Where a number could not be established, the article says so and explains how to measure the thing on your own hardware instead. That is a deliberate trade: a method you can repeat is worth more in three years than a benchmark taken on somebody else's machine today.

We do not run a test laboratory, and no article on this site claims that we do. You will not find the phrases “we tested” or “our experts” here, because neither would be true.

What we do not publish

• Scores. There is no rating out of ten anywhere on the site. A number that compresses a whole product into one digit hides exactly the detail that would help you decide.
• Product recommendations by model name. Articles describe the class of thing and the two or three checks that separate a good one from a bad one, because model names change every year and the checks do not.
• Shopping links. No article on this site earns a commission on anything you buy.

Disclosure

This domain carries paid placements. They are of two kinds, and both are marked.

Link partners. A strip of partner links appears at the foot of the front page. Those links are paid for. They are not endorsements, they are not editorial, and no article changes because of them.

Commissioned articles. A number of articles on this domain were written for and paid for by third parties, many of them in languages other than English and on subjects unrelated to games. They are listed in the international section of the archive and they are not the work of this desk. They stay online because removing published pages breaks links other people made; they are kept out of the front page because they are not what this magazine is.

Corrections

If an article gets something wrong, the fix goes into the article itself rather than into a note at the bottom, and the review date on the page moves. Substantive changes — a corrected figure, a reversed conclusion — are stated in the text where the change happened, so a returning reader can see what moved.

Photographs

Every photograph on this site comes from a free-licence source, overwhelmingly Wikimedia Commons, and every one carries the photographer's name and the licence in the caption. Where an article shows a piece of hardware, that is a real photograph of real hardware, not a rendering and not an illustration.

The archive

PocketGamer.org started in 2001 as a magazine about games on Pocket PC hardware, written by one editor with a lot of help from readers. That material is still here, unedited, at its original addresses. It is dated, and that is the point of it.