Who this policy covers

It covers everything published on footballarcade.xyz: the games, the cornerstone guides, the shorter articles, the category pages and these policy pages. The editor, Daniel Carter, is responsible for all of it.

Our publishing workflow

Nothing is published straight from a draft. Every page goes through the same sequence:

  1. ResearchIdentify a real question players ask, usually from a game's own mechanics or from reader mail.
  2. Keyword selectionConfirm how people actually phrase the question, so the page can be found by the words readers use.
  3. Topic validationCheck that we do not already answer it. If we do, we improve the existing page instead of publishing a second one.
  4. Draft creationWrite the page against the live game, with the game open.
  5. Editorial reviewA human read-through for accuracy, clarity, structure and usefulness. Anything that cannot be demonstrated is cut.
  6. Fact checkingEvery number, mechanic and claim is verified against the game code or a cited source, per our fact-checking policy.
  7. SEO optimisationTitle, description, headings, internal links and structured data — applied after the content is right, never instead of it.
  8. Image creationOriginal artwork is generated for the page. We use no third-party photography and no club, league or player imagery.
  9. Internal linkingThe page is linked from its category and from the relevant cornerstone guide, and links out to the games it describes.
  10. PublicationThe page goes live with a publication date and a byline.
  11. Performance monitoringWe watch which pages answer the question and which get abandoned.
  12. Content updatePages are revisited on a rolling cycle and immediately whenever a game mechanic changes. The last-updated date is changed only when the content changes.

How games are tested

A guide is only as honest as the testing behind it. Every game published here is tested:

  • On desktop with a keyboard, and with a mouse where the game supports aiming.
  • On a phone with touch input, in portrait and landscape, at a small screen size.
  • For fairness, by playing enough runs to confirm that the difficulty ramp is survivable and that no situation is unavoidable.
  • For accessibility, by confirming that the game can be started, played and restarted with the keyboard alone, and that nothing depends on colour to be understood.
  • Against its own numbers, so that the scoring table on the game page matches what the code actually does.

When we quote a figure — a 0.32 second reload, a 94% power threshold, an 11-pixel crossbar tolerance — it is read from the game's source, which is served to your browser and can be inspected.

Content quality rules

These are the rules we hold ourselves to, and the reason some of our articles are shorter than they could be:

  • No padding. Word count is not a goal.
  • No invented statistics, quotes or experts. If we do not have a number, we say so.
  • No claimed credentials. Our editor's experience is in browser gaming, and that is all we claim.
  • No near-duplicate pages. One question, one page.
  • No search-engine-first writing. If a sentence exists only for a keyword, it is deleted.
  • No misleading headlines. The page has to deliver what the title promises.

How drafts are produced

Drafting is assisted by software tools, as most publishing is in 2026. That does not change who is responsible: every page is planned, reviewed, fact-checked against the live game and signed off by a human editor before it is published, and the byline names the person accountable for it. We do not publish unreviewed generated text, and we do not run an automated pipeline that puts pages live without a person reading them.

Site owners: keep this section accurate

If your production process differs from the description above, edit this section so that it describes what you actually do. An editorial policy that does not match reality is worse than no policy at all.

Editorial independence

Our editorial decisions are made independently of our advertising. Specifically:

  • Advertising is served programmatically. Advertisers get no say in what we publish and no advance view of it.
  • We do not publish sponsored articles, paid reviews or paid links. If we ever did, it would be labelled clearly at the top of the page.
  • We do not accept payment to add a game, to rank a game higher, or to describe a game more favourably.
  • Ad slots are placed away from gameplay and are never styled to look like navigation or game controls.

Corrections

We correct mistakes rather than quietly deleting them. When a substantive error is fixed, we add a dated correction note at the foot of the page describing what was wrong. Minor fixes — a typo, a broken link — are made without a note. The full process is in our fact-checking policy.

To report an error, email editorial@footballarcade.xyz or use the contact form.

Updates and review cycle

Game pages are reviewed whenever the game changes. Guides are reviewed on a rolling cycle, prioritised by how much traffic they get and how likely they are to go stale. Pages carry both a publication date and a last-updated date, and we only change the last-updated date when the content has genuinely changed — not to appear fresh.

What we will not publish

  • Content that implies affiliation with FIFA, UEFA, a league, a club or a broadcaster.
  • Club crests, league marks, competition branding, kit designs or player likenesses.
  • Copied game code, copied artwork or copied text from another publisher.
  • Time-sensitive claims about live football that we cannot verify.
  • Pages that exist only to hold an advertisement.