Independence
No one pays for coverage, placement, a ranking position or a verdict. We do not accept sponsored reviews. Affiliate commission has no path to influencing a verdict — in our system a verdict record references its evidence and nothing else. There is no field in which a commission rate could appear.
Evidence before conclusions
A page cannot publish on this site without:
- every factual claim recorded against a piece of evidence
- an evidence tier derived from those claims — it cannot be typed in by hand
- a named human who verified the claims
- a last-verified date, shown on the page
- an affiliate disclosure
These are enforced in code, not by memory. A page missing any of them stays a draft.
The word “review”
We use it for one thing only: a product we own, tested under our published method, photographed by us. Everything else is a comparison, a buying guide or an explainer. If you see the word “review” on this site, we had the thing in our hands.
Language discipline
We never write “we tested” or “in our testing” about something we did not test. Our publishing system scans for those phrases and blocks the page if the evidence behind it is Tier C or D. At those tiers we name the source instead: “RTINGS measured…”, “per Hardware Unboxed…”.
What we will not publish
- Gaming news, rumours, leaks or patch-note summaries
- Scored game reviews
- Generic “top 10 gaming gear” listicles
- A review of a product we do not own
- A recommendation resting only on manufacturer specifications
- Hosted user reviews — we have no capacity to moderate them, and unmoderated review sections are a known vector for fake reviews
- Hidden-gem or back-catalogue game curation. That is a different site’s job.
Automation
We use automation for data work: collecting prices, normalising specifications, building comparison tables, flagging pages that have gone stale. Automation is explicitly not permitted to write a verdict, claim that we tested something, invent a measurement, or publish anything. A page whose every claim was machine-generated cannot be published, even if each claim is individually well-evidenced. Judgement is a person’s job.
We do not buy products intending to return them. That would breach retailer terms and it would not be honest.
Corrections
When we get something wrong we correct it on the page and say what changed. We keep a log of corrections, and a correction is never quietly folded into an edit.