Methodology
Every guide is built by a person reading official sources, recording what was checked, and dating the result. This page explains what that process covers and, just as importantly, what it does not.
What each guide researches
- The publisher position on monetized gameplay video, and any conditions attached to it.
- Whether licensed music is present, and what official documentation says about it.
- Whether a streamer mode exists, where it is, and what it actually changes.
- Reported VOD mutes, copyright claims, and stream interruptions.
- Five content warning categories, plus official age rating descriptors.
- Completion time estimates, when there is enough data for them to mean anything.
What the labels mean
- Unknown
- The fact has not been established. It is not a statement that a risk is absent.
- No public policy found
- An editor searched the publisher legal or policy site, the developer support site, the creator or video policy pages, and the official FAQ, and found no public policy on the review date.
- No verified streamer mode found
- The official settings and support material that were checked did not establish a dedicated mode. The game may still have audio options worth using.
- No issue identified in reviewed sources
- No incident appeared in the specific sources listed on that guide. This is not proof that the soundtrack is cleared or that nothing will be claimed in future.
- Not assessed
- Research is incomplete. A guide in this state is not published or indexed.
Evidence hierarchy
Sources are ranked, and each claim shows the kind of evidence behind it.
- Current official publisher, developer, support, accessibility, creator policy, or patch documentation.
- Official storefront or rating board data obtained under permitted terms.
- Direct evidence of an incident, such as a documented VOD mute or claim notice.
- Multiple current community reports with enough detail to corroborate each other.
- A single current community report.
Unsourced posts and summaries are research leads only and never support a published claim. We do not publish numerical confidence scores, because a made up percentage would imply precision the evidence does not have.
Review dates and freshness
Every published claim stores the date it was reviewed, the date the next review is due, and the date it becomes stale. The default review window is ninety days, and the stale boundary is one hundred and twenty days, though a known policy expiry or announced effective date can move either boundary earlier.
A guide past its review date is labelled and stays available. A guide that has gone stale is removed from the catalog, the search index, and the sitemap until an editor reviews it again, and it carries a prominent notice.
Limits of the warning coverage
Warning coverage is deliberately narrow in this version: flashing lights and photosensitivity, self harm or suicide, animal harm or death, sexual violence, and graphic violence or gore. It is not a complete content warning database, and a category that reports no evidence found is a statement about the sources reviewed rather than about the game.
For games built around user generated content, such as social platforms, role play servers, and heavily modded titles, the research covers the base client only. What other people build inside those games is not covered.
Playtime limits
Completion estimates come from one provider and are shown only when the submission count is high enough to be meaningful. For ongoing, sandbox, and live service games, a completion figure would mislead, so the guide says so instead of inventing a number. Estimates are never mixed with average time played figures, which measure something different.
Why there is no safe to stream badge
A single verdict would have to average facts that do not average. A game can permit monetized gameplay and still contain a licensed track that gets a VOD muted. A streamer mode can reduce risk without eliminating it. Each fact is presented separately so you can act on the one that matters to your stream.
How the launch catalog was chosen
The catalog began with a dated snapshot of Steam current player figures. Non game utilities were removed, duplicate editions were combined into one guide, and a small number of popular games from a separate chart were added to reach the launch count. It is a sampling method for choosing which guides to write first, not a ranking, and the figures behind it are not shown as live data.
How corrections are reviewed
Reports arrive privately. An editor checks the named source, decides whether the evidence meets the threshold for that kind of claim, and either updates the guide with a new review date or closes the report. Nothing submitted is published automatically, and no report becomes a public comment.