AdventureGamers.com believes in upholding strict journalistic standards. As such, our first priority is always to be a trustworthy source for news, information and consumer advice. We work hard to earn our readers' trust, but we also realize how easily this trust can be breached even by just the appearance of bias or favoritism. That's why Adventure Gamers has various policies and practices in place designed to protect its editorial integrity and independence.

Because the integrity of gaming sites has frequently come into question over the past few years, we decided to create this page to make it clear how we work.

Simply put, we never let advertising money influence our editorial process (and we never have since the founding of this site in 1998). We accomplish this through a strict 'separation of church and state' between editorial and advertising. We also maintain an advertising policy that keeps us in a strong independent position that allows us to play by our own rules.

We mainly shield ourselves from outside influence by having multiple revenue streams that are not dependent on adventure game publishers. We are fortunate enough to focus on a single genre, which gives us the option to run ads of games in other genres that we don't review and probably won't even talk about. We run advertisements for action-adventures, roleplaying games, MMOs, casual games and so on. Most of these general gaming ads are provided in bulk from third-party networks, which act as intermediaries between websites and advertisers.

Having a diverse ad portfolio ensures that if one adventure game publisher were ever to threaten to pull ads because of a review score, it wouldn't exactly be much of a threat. Not that we'd accuse any publisher of wanting to do such things, and not a single one ever has, but we're talking about even the mere possibility for these situations.

Furthermore, a significant part of our revenue comes from automated affiliate links placed under reviews and on game info pages. (It is always indicated on the site when a link is an affiliate link.) We run affiliate links to a handful of online retailers, download services and auction sites – parties that are all independent from game companies. The links are each associated with the 1000+ games in our database, meaning that our affiliate commissions come from hundreds of tiny sources, with each individual game responsible for no more than a few sales commissions in a given period. Manipulating review scores in an attempt to boost affiliate link performance would thus not only be strongly misguided (and severely damage our reputation), it would also have very little impact.

Finally, when we do sell advertisement space directly to developers and publishers of adventure games, the person responsible for setting up these ad deals (Marek) acts entirely on his own without coordinating with the editor (Jack). This has sometimes led to situations where Adventure Gamers has given a low score to a game that was also being advertised on the site. There's no doubt that some companies consider this possibility 'less than ideal', but frankly that's not our concern, as we pride ourselves in our ability to be honest and do business at the same time. Fortunately, most companies understand this, and it's a system that's been proven to work.

As an extra protection against advertisers' influence, reviewers are never asked to change the score for a game after a review is submitted. The editor's goal is high quality and accuracy, and to ensure that the text of the review and the given score are in line with each other, but will never override the reviewer's final scoring decision. In turn, reviewers' names are never revealed ahead of time and they do not communicate with game companies themselves, avoiding even the possibility of behind-the-scenes influence, whether personal or monetary.

In the end, though, it all boils down to trust. Our loyalty is to you, not game companies. After all, without your trust our words wouldn't carry any weight, and we wouldn't deserve the respect of the adventure game community. That's the attitude that has kept us going for all these years. We worked very hard to earn your respect and your trust, and we will continue to work hard to keep it.