Sourcing & Attribution Standards

A claim is only as good as what it rests on. Pro Slot Games treats sourcing as the load-bearing part of everything we publish, and this page sets out the standards behind it: what we consider a legitimate source, how we attribute the facts we report, how we handle official materials and embargoes, and the narrow circumstances in which we would rely on an anonymous source. These standards work hand in hand with our fact-checking policy, which describes how we actually verify a claim once we have traced it to its origin.

Our sourcing standards

We build our coverage from sources a reader could reasonably trust, and we prefer to get as close to the origin of a fact as we can. Primary and official sources come first: a studio’s own website, a publisher’s announcement, an official rules document or patch note, a storefront listing, a first-party technical specification. When something can be confirmed at its source, that is where we confirm it.

Established, reputable outlets and reference works come next, both for corroborating primary facts and for context and history that primary sources do not provide. Everything below that tier — forums, social posts, aggregators, unverified tips — is treated as a lead to be checked, never as a fact in itself. A promising rumour is still a rumour, and we label it as one until a source in a position to know it confirms otherwise.

Because most of our work is evergreen analysis, explainer, and retrospective coverage of games and formats that genuinely exist, our sourcing burden is often simply accuracy at the source: writing only about real games, real studios, and real mechanics we understand correctly, and grounding every specific detail in something checkable. We do not invent statistics, and where a number cannot be responsibly grounded we describe the reality qualitatively instead.

Attribution

Attribution is how we show our work. When a fact originates with an identifiable source, we say so, so readers can weigh it and trace it themselves. We attribute in proportion to how load-bearing and how contestable a claim is: a widely established fact may simply appear in the closing sources block, while a specific, disputable, or consequential claim is attributed inline to whoever is in a position to know it.

Every article ends with a sources block listing real, verifiable references. We prefer canonical homepages and official roots — a studio’s site, a storefront, a publisher’s page, a reputable outlet’s home — over deep links we cannot vouch for, and we never fabricate a citation to make a piece look better sourced than it is. If a source is listed, it is real, and it points where we say it does. Where we quote or closely paraphrase another outlet’s original reporting, we credit that outlet rather than presenting the work as our own.

Use of official materials

Official materials — press kits, developer statements, patch notes, rules references, trailers, and screenshots supplied by publishers or platform holders — are a legitimate and often essential source. We use them, and we use them with our eyes open. Official materials tell us reliably what a company says about its own product; they are not, on their own, an independent verdict on it. We distinguish clearly between what a maker claims and what we can independently confirm, and we do not let promotional framing from a source become our own framing.

When we reproduce official assets such as key art or screenshots, we do so as identifying illustration of the subject we are covering, credited appropriately, and never in a way that misrepresents a company’s material as our own reporting or as an endorsement it did not give.

Embargoes

Embargoes are a routine part of covering games and hardware: a publisher shares information in advance on the condition that it not be published before an agreed time. We honour the embargoes we agree to, because keeping our word is a condition of continuing to receive early access to information our readers benefit from. Agreeing to an embargo, however, never means agreeing to a particular slant, and it never grants the source approval over our coverage. If an embargo were ever conditioned on favourable treatment or editorial control, we would decline it, because those terms are incompatible with the independence set out in our ethics policy. An embargo governs when we publish, never what we conclude.

Anonymous sources

Anonymity is a serious step, not a routine convenience, and the evergreen nature of most of our coverage means we rarely need it. When we do grant it — typically where a source risks real harm by speaking on the record about a matter of genuine public interest — we do so deliberately. An editor must know the source’s identity even when readers do not; we satisfy ourselves that the source is credible and in a position to know; and we seek independent corroboration rather than resting a significant claim on a single unnamed voice. We do not use anonymity to launder speculation or to dodge accountability, and we tell readers, as far as we responsibly can, why a source’s identity is being protected.

Questions and corrections

If you want to understand how a particular claim was sourced, or you believe we have misattributed or misused a source, we want to know. Sourcing questions can go to editorial@proslotgames.com, and factual errors — including a source that does not support what we attributed to it — should be reported to corrections@proslotgames.com, where they are handled through our public corrections process.