Editorial policy

We read the public RSS feeds that games publications operate. A feed carries a headline, the publisher's own short summary, and a link — and it exists precisely so that other people can read it. We do not scrape article pages, we do not read past the summary a publisher chose to syndicate, and we do not reproduce anyone's article text.

A story is only considered for coverage once it clusters — that is, once we can see it reported independently, or reported by an outlet with a strong track record. Following the guidance we set ourselves, a date, a price or a sales figure needs two independent outlets before we will state it plainly. Where only one outlet has something, we say that in the piece. Where a source says "reportedly", we keep the hedge rather than quietly promoting a rumour into a fact.

The feeds we currently read:

• Eurogamer
• Polygon
• GameSpot
• Kotaku
• VGC
• GamesRadar+
• PC Gamer
• Rock Paper Shotgun
• Nintendo Life
• Push Square
• Pure Xbox
• Gematsu
• Siliconera
• GamesIndustry.biz
• Game Developer

Every article we publish links to each source it drew on, by name, at the foot of the piece. If you are one of these publishers and you would rather we did not read your feed, tell us and we will remove it.

Drafts are produced with a large language model. We think you are entitled to know that, so it is disclosed on every article it touched rather than buried here.

What it is given is deliberately narrow: the clustered headlines, the publishers' own summaries, and the links. It is not given article bodies, and it is instructed that it has not read the articles and must not write as though it has. Its job is selection and commentary — which stories matter, what connects them, and what we think about them. That is the part worth reading, and it is the part a reworded summary of somebody else's reporting could never be.

Before a draft is published it has to pass automated checks. Every link it cites is compared against the links we actually handed it, and a draft that invents a URL is discarded outright rather than corrected. Drafts are also rejected for being too thin, for missing citations, and for the filler phrasing we do not want in our writing. A rejected draft is thrown away. We do not patch a draft that has gone wrong and publish it anyway.

These pieces publish once they pass the checks above, without someone reading each one first. We would rather tell you that than imply an editor we do not have. The byline is the Playkora account, because the platform stands behind what it publishes — a person's name on a piece they had not read would be the dishonest version of this.

That places the weight on the checks being real, which is why they are described in detail rather than summarised, and why a failed check discards the piece instead of flagging it for someone to wave through.

It also means corrections matter more, not less. If we get something wrong, tell us and we will fix it. Substantive corrections are noted in the article rather than silently edited away, and the modified date changes so you can see it happened.

We will not rewrite another outlet's article and pass it off as our own reporting. We will not publish invented quotes, invented statistics, or a fabricated release date. We will not host a publisher's screenshots or key art — the artwork on our news pieces is our own, generated for the article, which is why it looks like a title card rather than a screenshot.

We also will not scale this up. Two pieces a day and one weekly recap exists to keep this a section with a point of view rather than a firehose. Publishing more would mean covering stories we have nothing to say about, which is how a news section turns into filler, and it would make the care described above impossible to sustain.

This applies to the rest of the site too. Game pages carry no generated content at all: a description, an image description or an FAQ answer on a game page was written by that game's developer, and a page that is missing them does not publish.