Editorial Policy

Our editorial standard

Every article on this site exists to answer a question a player might actually have. If a topic cannot be written about in a way that tells a reader something they did not already know, we do not publish it — which is why there are seventy guides rather than seven hundred.

The standard we hold ourselves to is specificity. "Time your jumps carefully" is not advice, it is filler. "Tap rather than hold, because a full-height jump keeps you airborne for three quarters of a second and a low obstacle can appear underneath you" is advice. Nearly every editorial decision on this site follows from that distinction.

How topics are chosen

Topics come from three places, in order of priority:

1. Questions we are asked. Contact-form questions and repeated confusions during playtesting are the best source of article ideas we have.
2. Mechanics that deserve explanation. If a system in our games is genuinely interesting and not obvious from playing — combo timeout behaviour, telegraph lengths, how a procedural generator stays fair — it earns an article.
3. Genre context. A smaller set of articles covers the wider subject of monster arcade games, browser gaming and arcade design, because that context helps people understand what they are playing.

We do not choose topics by scraping competitors, rewriting search results, or generating keyword permutations. An article that exists only to target a phrase is exactly the kind of thin content we are trying not to make.

How articles are written and reviewed

Every guide follows the same path: topic selected, relevant game source read, draft written, numbers verified against the code, review by somebody other than the writer, publication with accurate dates.

Where an article makes a claim about one of our games, that claim is checked against the source rather than inferred from play. Where it makes a claim about the wider world — human reaction times, for instance — it is either stated as an approximation with appropriate hedging or linked to a source. We would rather write "typically around 200–300 milliseconds for most adults" than invent a precise figure that sounds more authoritative.

Use of AI tooling

We use AI tooling in the production of this site, and we would rather state that plainly than leave it implied. Specifically: AI assistance is used for drafting, restructuring, copy-editing and code review.

It is not used as a source of facts. No number, mechanic description or claim about our games enters an article because a language model produced it; those come from the game source. Nothing is published without a human reading it in full, checking it against the code, and taking responsibility for it.

Dates, updates and rebalancing

Published and updated dates on this site are real. A published date is when the page first went live. An updated date changes when the content materially changes — not when a typo is fixed and not on a schedule to look fresh.

The most common reason for an update is a game rebalance. When we change a difficulty curve, a timing window or an enemy behaviour, the game page and every guide that quoted the old numbers are revised together. A guide that describes a game as it used to be is worse than no guide at all.

Corrections

When we get something wrong, we fix it in place and change the updated date. For a material correction — one that changes the advice a reader would act on — we add a short, visible correction note at the foot of the article stating what was wrong and when it changed. We do not quietly edit a substantive error and pretend it was never there.

To report an error, email editor@monsterarcade.xyz with the page URL and the specific claim you think is wrong. Corrections are handled ahead of everything else in the queue.

Advertising and editorial independence

This site is intended to be supported by display advertising. Advertisers have no influence over editorial content, and no article on this site is sponsored, paid for, or written in exchange for anything. We do not run affiliate links.

Advertising placement follows rules we set for ourselves: never over a game or its controls, never positioned to catch a mis-tap, never styled to resemble navigation or game content, and always inside a container labelled as advertising. Where an ad container sits within an article, it sits between sections rather than interrupting a paragraph.

Publishing cadence

We publish when there is something worth publishing. Our working target is up to two well-researched articles per day when there is genuinely that much to say, spaced roughly twelve hours apart — but the cadence is a ceiling rather than a quota, and we miss it regularly on purpose.

We do not mass-produce pages, spin variations of an existing article, or publish to a schedule for its own sake. The full workflow, including how we identify topics worth covering, is documented in the project README.