Editorial Policy and Standards
GamECLicKs.com earns money from advertising and affiliate commissions. That creates an obvious tension with giving readers honest buying advice, and we would rather explain how we manage it than pretend it does not exist. This page sets out how we work.
How We Research Pricing
Console and hardware prices are the backbone of this site, and getting them wrong is the fastest way to lose a reader's trust. Our process:
- Every price is checked against at least two independent sources before publication, and against the manufacturer's own announcement where one exists.
- We date every price. Our Weekly Drop price board carries a visible "updated" stamp, and articles state the date their figures reflect.
- We distinguish MSRP from street price. When we mention a discount or a refurbished figure, we say where it was observed.
- We flag announced future changes rather than quietly updating later, so readers can act before a rise lands.
- We do not scrape prices and present them as reporting. Our live deals feed is clearly labeled as automated data from CheapShark, separate from our written analysis.
Aggregated Data vs. Our Own Work
Two sections of the homepage pull live third-party data: the Top Games rankings come from the RAWG database, and the Hot Deals feed comes from CheapShark. Both are credited on the page. We include them because they are genuinely useful, but we draw a clear line between that automated data and our own editorial writing, which is researched and written by us.
How We Handle Corrections
We get things wrong. When we do:
- We fix the error and add a dated update note explaining what changed, rather than editing silently.
- When an article is overtaken by events, such as a predicted price change taking effect, we add a dated note at the top pointing to newer coverage instead of rewriting history.
- We update the article's modification date so readers and search engines can see it has been revised.
If you spot an error, tell us via the contact page with CORRECTION in the subject.
Affiliate Links
Many product links here are Amazon affiliate links. If you buy through one, we earn a small commission and you pay the same price. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
The rules we hold ourselves to:
- Commission never determines the recommendation. When we concluded the Xbox Series X was poor value at its new price, we published that, despite every Xbox link on the page being monetized.
- We recommend against buying when that is the right answer. Telling readers to wait for a patch, or that a sale is not worth it, costs us money in the short term and is the only way the advice means anything.
- Every affiliate link is machine-readable as one, tagged
rel="sponsored", and disclosed in the footer of every page. - We do not use affiliate links inside our privacy, terms, or policy pages.
Advertising
Display advertising on this site is served by Google AdSense. We do not choose the individual advertisers, and an ad appearing next to an article does not imply any relationship between that advertiser and our coverage. We do not publish sponsored articles disguised as editorial, and we do not sell links within existing articles.
How We Source Images
We use two categories of imagery, and we label both:
- Publisher press materials, obtained from official public channels such as PlayStation.Blog, Xbox Wire, Nintendo's product pages, and publishers' own media galleries. These are used for editorial commentary and credited to the studio or publisher, with a link to the source. They are marked with a "Press" tag.
- Openly licensed photography, primarily hardware photos from Wikimedia Commons, credited to the photographer with the specific license named, such as CC BY 4.0 or CC0.
We do not take images from other publications, fan sites, or image aggregators, and we do not present publisher press art as though it were openly licensed. Rights holders who want something removed should see the contact page.
Who Writes This
GamECLicKs.com is run by Jon, known online as @jliquor. Jon picks the stories and the angle on each one. The articles are then researched and written with the help of AI tools, checked against primary sources such as publisher announcements and the manufacturers' own price pages, and nothing goes live until Jon publishes it. Bylines say exactly that: "Story by Jon (@jliquor), written with AI assistance." Illustrations are original art made with AI-assisted design tools and are credited that way under each image.
The site has covered gaming since 1998. Where an article makes a buying recommendation, it reflects our own analysis of publicly available pricing, specifications, and critical reception, and we cite the sources we relied on. When we get something wrong, we correct it and say so on the page.
What We Do Not Do
- Publish AI-generated filler to pad out the site. Every article starts from a story Jon chose and is checked against sources before it goes live.
- Republish other outlets' articles or reviews as our own.
- Accept payment for a positive review or a place in our curated resources list.
- Use clickbait headlines that the article does not deliver on.