Ethics & Conflicts of Interest

This page covers the ethical commitments RetroShell makes to its readers. These go beyond the legal minimum.

The editorial wall

RetroShell’s editorial output is decided on news value alone. Whether a company advertises with us, sells through our shop or pays an affiliate commission has no bearing on whether we cover their news, how we frame it, or what we say about it.

Gifts and review units

  • We accept review units (hardware, games, merchandise) for editorial consideration, and we disclose that relationship in-article.
  • Review units we choose to keep past the review window are logged; we will return items over a nominal value on request.
  • We do not accept cash gifts, paid travel, paid hospitality or sponsored events attendance.
  • Gifts worth more than £50 require the Editor-in-Chief’s prior approval and written disclosure on any resulting article.

We do not run sponsored content styled as editorial. Any paid-for content we run will carry a clear “Sponsored”, “Partner” or “Advertisement” label in the byline area and at the top of the article. Sponsored posts will never appear in the main news index without that label.

Some articles link to retailers (Amazon, eBay, CeX, Retro-Bit, Limited Run Games, and others) using an affiliate tag that may earn RetroShell a small commission if you complete a purchase. Affiliate links never influence editorial opinion. When an article contains affiliate links, we flag this at the bottom of the piece. We do not run affiliate links in news stories about breaking events; they appear mainly in buying guides and feature pieces where a purchase action is genuinely useful to the reader.

Conflicts of interest

RetroShell’s founder also operates Pub.cat’s wider portfolio (including Barna.News and Catalan.News) and owns the RetroShell Shop business. These are related but operationally separate. If an article concerns a competitor or partner to one of these businesses, the conflict will be disclosed in the article.

No member of the RetroShell team holds equity in any company whose products we cover. If that ever changes, we will disclose it.

AI disclosure

We use large language models (Google Gemini, xAI Grok) to assist with article drafting, fact-checking and image description. This is disclosed prominently on the Masthead, Editorial Standards and Sources & Methodology pages, and every AI-collaborator byline links back to that disclosure.

Political and ideological stance

RetroShell is politically neutral. We avoid taking editorial positions on matters outside our subject area. When retro gaming intersects with politics (labour disputes in games studios, export controls on hardware, platform governance), we report the facts and let readers draw their own conclusions.

Ethics queries

If you think we have fallen short of any of the commitments on this page, please email corrections@retroshell.com with specifics. We take such queries seriously.