We publish game leaks with a grade attached, so you know how much weight to put on a story before you read it — not after it falls apart.
Most leak coverage flattens everything into one register. A store listing that went live by mistake gets the same headline treatment as a forum post from an account created that morning. Readers are left to sort it out, and usually can't.
We grade instead. Every post on this site carries a five-bar credibility rating, and the reasoning behind it is in the post itself. When we're not sure, we say so in the grade rather than hedging in the copy.
The rating reflects how likely the core claim is to hold up — not how exciting it is, and not how much we'd like it to be true.
Officially acknowledged, or published by the company itself before being pulled. Store listings and first-party pages land here.
Verifiable material from a build, a manifest, or a document, corroborated by a second source. We expect these to hold.
Consistent with what's known and from a source with a track record, but not independently confirmed. Read it as a strong lead, not a fact.
A single uncorroborated source, or circumstantial evidence like a patent filing. Published because it's interesting, flagged because it's fragile.
Circulating widely with no verifiable basis. We cover these only when the rumour itself is the story.
We don't name sources, and we don't publish details that would identify one. Where a post shows a redacted source line, that redaction is the point — you can see that a source exists and what category it falls into, without anything that narrows down who it is.
We don't pay for leaks. We don't publish material that exposes someone's personal information, and we won't run a story whose main effect is getting a junior employee fired.
A grade is a claim about evidence, not a promise about the future. Plans change after they leak.
Leaks age badly. A build that was real in March describes a game that shipped differently in November, and sometimes the underlying claim was simply wrong.
When that happens we update the post, mark the change at the top, and adjust the grade. We don't quietly delete posts that didn't pan out — the record of what we got wrong is part of what makes the grades worth anything.
TheCyberLeeks is run by [EDIT: your name or handle], who has been covering the industry since [EDIT: year]. Questions, corrections and complaints all go to the same place.