Fact-Checking Policy

Two kinds of claim

Almost everything we publish falls into one of two categories, and they are verified differently.

• Claims about our own games. Timing windows, enemy speeds, combo behaviour, spawn rules, difficulty curves. These are verified by reading the game source. There is no estimating: if a guide says the combo window is two seconds, somebody opened the file and checked.
• Claims about the wider world. Human reaction times, how browsers behave, general facts about arcade gaming. These are verified against a source, stated with appropriate uncertainty, or not stated at all.

How claims about our games are verified

Every guide that quotes a number is checked against the code before publication. Numbers in articles are the same numbers the game uses at runtime, not approximations from playing.

This is also why we can be unusually specific. When a guide tells you that a boss telegraph is twenty per cent longer on the first cycle of a phase, that is not a feel — it is a constant in a file. That specificity is the main thing our guides offer over writing about these games from the outside, and it only stays true if the checking is real.

When a game is rebalanced, a check runs over every guide that references it. Any article quoting a changed value is revised and re-dated at the same time as the game page.

How external facts are handled

For anything we did not build, the standard is: link it, hedge it, or leave it out.

1. Link it. If a claim has a checkable source, we link to the source rather than asserting it.
2. Hedge it. Where a figure is a broad approximation — typical human reaction time, for example — we state it as a range and say it is typical rather than presenting a precise number.
3. Leave it out. If we cannot support a claim and it is not essential, it does not go in. An article is allowed to say that we do not know something.

What we will never publish

This list is deliberately explicit, because these are the specific failure modes that make gaming content untrustworthy:

• Invented statistics — player counts, download figures, market sizes or survey results that we cannot source.
• Fabricated reviews, testimonials or star ratings, including structured data claiming ratings we have not received.
• Fake awards, partnerships, certifications, memberships or press coverage.
• Global leaderboards or rankings, since this is a static site with no server and any submitted score would be unverifiable.
• Claims about a game that have not been checked against its code.
• Screenshots, artwork or descriptions of games we did not make.

Our structured data reflects this. Game pages carry VideoGame markup describing what the page genuinely contains, with no aggregateRating and no interaction counts, because we do not collect either.

Reviewing older content

Articles are re-reviewed when the thing they describe changes — primarily a game rebalance, but also a change to the engine, the controls, or how storage works. We do not run a blanket annual refresh, because re-dating an article that has not changed is a small lie about how current it is.

If you find an article that describes a game as it no longer behaves, that is a genuine bug in our process and we would like to hear about it.

Challenging something we published

Email editor@monsterarcade.xyz with the page URL and the specific claim. You do not need to be polite about it and you do not need to be certain — a suspicion that a number looks wrong is a useful report.

What happens next: we check the claim against the source, correct it in place if it is wrong, update the article date, and add a visible correction note if the error would have changed the advice a reader acted on. If the claim turns out to be right, we will tell you why.