On the other side: why devs pressure journalists for good game reviews - and why it's right for them to do so |
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When Jeff Gerstmann was fired from GameSpot for giving a less than raving review (to put it lightly) of Eidos Interactive's Kane
& Lynch: Dead Men (Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, PC), the gaming industry went abuzz. A lot of speculation came out that he was fired because his review basically antagonized a major advertiser of the site (who conveniently was Eidos, advertising the very game he butchered in the review). Opinions were thrown left and right, and the effects have been far-reaching. Gerstmann's superior was fired, a domino effect happened with other reviewers of the site resigning, and Gerstmann - well, he was pretty much considered to be the gaming journalist's hero for not buckling down from the intense political pressure of those in the suits just to rate the game a good score.
However, that's only one example (and probably the most highlighted) of the things that game reviewers go through. And truth is, that's only one side of the coin. Today we found a very interesting article that allows us a peek at the other side of the fence when it comes to game reviews - particularly why publishers put pressure on game journalists, and more intriguingly, why they are entitled to do so.
Sore Thumbs Blog posted the article coming from a certain "Anonymous Guy from Big Publisher". According to the site, Anonymous Guy wrote to them to show the PR and marketing perspectives on the whole business of elbowing their way to get a good review.
But some of the points Anonymous Guy raised was how the developers "kill themselves" to finish a game, and how that game is treated rather unfairly by so-called reviewers who only play two hours out of a 30-hour game. Then there's also the issue on specialized coverage. Sometimes a reviewer who's actually an FPS gamer would be given a sim racing game to review, and so the appreciation and treatment of the review is not as holistic and objective as it could have been had the reviewer been given an FPS title.
The most interesting bit, however, is how Anonymous Guy observes that there is no "real" journalism in the gaming industry for a long time now. He says:
The industry has been crying out for “real” journalism for a long time now. What this means to me is not harsher reviews, but thoughtful analysis about games, real knowledge of game development, and a deep history of playing games. And ultimately, gauging who the game would be fun for, and scoring it accordingly. I think today it requires a specialty – if you are a hardcore RTS players, look at only those kinds of games. If you are an editor-in-chief, find the right journalists and manage them properly. But no one expects this to happen any times soon – there is no journalism school for videogames, and the Internet will breed more and more amateurs. So the battles will rage on!
And we do fully expect the battle to be fired up once more with this post. How about you guys? What do you think? Is there ever an excuse for PR and marketing folks to pressure game journalists into giving what they would deem "fair and reasonable" reviews (in other words, good scores for them)? Share your thoughts below.
If you want to check out the whole post (and we're sure you do) just follow the source link below.
Related Articles:
- GameSpot editorial director fired for Kane & Lynch review?
- GameSpot-Gerstmann controversy updates: the domino effect
- Jeff Gerstmann's superior fired from CNET
- GameSpot talks Gerstmann, says Eidos did not cause termination
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Comments [refresh]
Look no further than RevolutionPSP.com for real video game journalism that centers on games, accessories and homebrew for the PSP. Its said that It will also have in depth and thought provoking interviews with publishers as well as hombrews mightiest developers too.
Devs have no right to put pressure on reviewers... none at all, it's not a reviewers job to know the ins and outs of developing.. the same way a movie reviewer doesn't have to spend years making films. A game is something everyone should be able to enjoy... if the devs can't create that... or can't handle criticism, maybe they should actually create something to be excited about making..
Ya know what? This is all nonsense, I don't care what multi-billion dollar companies think, I want reviewers to have no contact with devs. It's not very professional to be in bed with the game devs. This is a problem in the mass media as well, slowly companies and powerful people are begginning to get control of the news and newspapers... now they can make the news print whatever they want because of money. This will happen to videogames if reviewers keep being harassed because of harsh reviewers. It's a shame the internet fosters so many whiners.
That is their job. If ratings in general are poor does it not reflect the fact that the quality of games have gone down the tubes? Remember what it was like when you got home from the mall with your mom and you take the shrink wrap off a huge KQ6 box, whip out the deck of floppies, and then went a: and then install.exe??? Remember the excitement??? Or remember the excitement of putting Mario 3 in your system for the first time and then going OMGWTFBBQ????? Remember finishing Xenogears and thinking to yourself, "I still don't get whats going on 100% but that was freaking awesome"
I sympathize with modern game developers, but the system is broken and they are not being put into good use. They keep being told to work on eye candy, ear candy, brain candy, and whatnot but where is the SOUL CANDY???
soul candy , love it.
anyway, i see this as a problem also. Developers should not be expecting good reviews on a crappy game even if they lost 100 good men to botchillism for the sake of creating it.
remember when you were a kid? you made a necklace out of pasta in kindergarten and gave it to your mother? she loved it! or youd draw a dinosaur and she'd put it on the refridgerator and its probably still there.
thats what developers are asking for. . . problem is. . . i aint yo mama hahaha.
anyway the point is that while i respect how difficult it is to create a game, i also understand that GOOD games are not that hard to make, they require something that corporate america is missing.
heres one for graphjam.com.
GAME QUALITY
game quality
|
good | .
| .
| .
| .
| .
| .
| .
| .
| .
bad |_._______________ _______________
high low
level of "corporate professional" interference.
and thats the truth of it.
ok the whitespace got truncated there so heres a fixed explanation of that . . .
GAME QUALITY
game quality
good
------|-----------------------------------------------*----
------| ------------------------------------------*--------
------| --------------------------------------*-----------
------| ----------------------------------*---------------
------| ------------------------------*-------------------
------| --------------------------*-----------------------
------| ---------------------*----------------------------
------| ----------------*---------------------------------
------| ----------*---------------------------------------
bad-|_----*______________ _______________ _
------high------------------------------------------- low
level of "corporate professional" interference.
******represent s number of games released.
as you can see by the graph, the louder the corporate whip cracks, the more crappy unpolished half-conceived tripe we see on the shelves.
and thats the truth of it.
graph sux. sue me its 7 am. you get the idea.
It's not. It's deceptive.
Kane and Lynch sucked hardcore. I don't think there is any argument to that.
i just read that guys description of the game.
he sounded like a total b*tch lol.
"i didnt like it waaaah its too ahrd to get on walls waaah i only have a total of 7 fingers waaaaaah the -F- word makes me uncomfortable waaaaaah i wanna play freedom fighters!!! WAAAH!"
i would have fired his ass too lol.
because of this guys whiney attitude that development team probably lost a looooot of money.
whatever happened to having two people, or even a team of people review a game?
it worked for siskil and egbert for years.
and yet a very bad game. gamespot gave it 9.0? LOL. i love third-person shooters, and no matter how i look at it, Soul Reaver for PS1 is far better than Assassin's Creed.
does anyone still remember NBA 2k5 worth $20? yea, it was because sites always gave good reviews to the NBA Live Series.
but seriously, if a game is of good quality, no matter what genre of gaming a person loves, he/she would still enjoy it. I, for one, didn't like ANY of the Metal Gear Solid series until MGS4 came. that means, it gave me a good reason to play it, because it MGS4 is such a good game.
what i'm trying to say is, as developers, they should maximize the game quality. as long as they make a good game, even though the gaming sites give them low scores, they will still sell. word-of-mouth. Monster Hunter 2 Freedom for the psp was given a 5.5 by gamespot. but it's one of the highest-selling title for the psp (in japan). how about that?
the entire article is retarded, and sounds as if it came from a 9 year old
mummy the picked on my game
anyway
"reviewer who's actually an FPS gamer would be given a sim racing game to review, and so the appreciation and treatment of the review is not as holistic and objective as it could have been had the reviewer been given an FPS title."
people will always have different tastes, who are you to judge it, and also you should never take into account a score rating, you should simply take it factual information in the article
for example if it says RPG, theres no way in hell ill buy it
then theres how the combat system etc works,
if it says, it has a great combet system
PUT THE ARTICLE DOWN IMMEDIATELY,
and go on the internet and try to find either pics vids or more information on it
review scores are pointless, for example every other person on the internet talks about warhawk
i hate the game
the only game i do like for the ps3 are sport games a cod4
all other fps dont match up to cod4, i prefer fps over sport games but there not to many good ones
Developers can't complain when a review comes out negative, who cares if they put hard work into the game? Had work on a crappy game doesn't mean that the reviews should be positive, you don't get an 'A' for effort, people work hard on films and music as well but some times it just turns terrible, happens to cars to. If reviewers were to sympathetic than people would complain that "oh the reviewers are in the developer's pocket". Reviewers have an obligation to point out ALL of the flaws in a game and if that game has a lot of problems, well than the developers have to deal with it. By this guy's logic Too Human should have been rated the single greatest game ever made, because the developers worked REALLY long and hard on it (12 years) and its many, many flaws should be overlooked because the developers but in an effort. No, developers have no right to pressure reviewers for good reviews because the reviewers write for the reader and not the developer, if the developers don't like that too bad, than they should with hold giving flawed software to reviewers until after the game has launched, like in the movie industry; because everyone knows that films that don't get early reviews generally do well right? Right........?
WARNING: Long rant ahead
At any rate, I was saddened when I found out (thankfully early enough not to get suckered into purchasing crappy games) the lengths game developers would go to in order to get a good review. Sure, I do feel that they deserve credit for their efforts, but they certainly cross the line when they decide to bribe and, threaten, or force game reviewers to lie.
Remember what it was like back when Shareware was popular on computer systems? There was a demo for most games and that consisted of enough gameplay to allow gamers to make an educated decision as to whether or not to purchase the full game.
Of course, this is not true for console systems, demos are not common enough. Sure, we have demos for some games, but what about the rest? Stores do not offer a chance to try most new games (Well, they do sometimes offer demos, but only for certain titles) and most will not even let you try used games. Even honest gamers who support the video game developers have to resort to piracy in order to try the game out and make an educated decision.
And forget about game trailers being 100% accurate, some game developers go as far as to create one or two minutes of cut scenes that are played before the title screen just to make the game look better in trailers yet put far less effort into the actual game's cutscenes (if they insert any into the game after the title screen at all). If you can make awesome visuals for a few minutes, you can put more effort into the way the game looks when you actually play it. Seriously, this is a form of false advertising.
If devs actually made something that was good rather than wrapping a turd in tinfoil and twisting someone's arm to get them to tell the world how wonderful it is, then there wouldn't be these kinds of problems. I've only played a VERY small handful of games in the last several years that I would deem worthy of a purchase.
I played a couple of RPG's on the 360 that are on extreme sides of the RPG spectrum - Enchanted Arms (JRPG) and Too Human (Loot RPG). They both received fair to mediocre scores in Gamespot other publications, but the perceived "faults" of the games are actually defining aspects of the genre.
If I were an editor and I wanted one of my movie critics to review "Shakespeare in Love" at the theater, I wouldn't give a press pass to the action movie critic.
If a really kicka$$ game is released to the world, gamers will notice it, and it's popularity will spread. It's true that some sh*tty reviews would decrease sales but in the end, we are the ones with the final word.
Has the public forgot that reviews are here to give gamers a second opinion before buying a title? Who is to say that a game is ACTUALLY worth 5/10? It's not absolutely true like many gamers now-days think.
It's the opinion of another person. It's a personal viewpoint based on the things which make a game fantastic. What happened to gamers having fun?
It's about the gamers. It always will be. End of story.
It's all about marketing my friend. In this generation, it's possible to make almost any game look dope in a trailer. More demo's would give gamers a chance to see if they enjoy a title.
But I'm not going to lie. It's true that:
1) Without reviews, we wouldn't know what games to buy or avoid. You could get a friend's opinion but that means he risked it too.
2) We have hundreds of sources to read reviews. We get a game's overall rating based on others' opinion.
3) If a game got a ton of crap-reviews, but in truth I actually enjoy the game, the bad reviews mean nothing.
4) Take a chance every now and then on that unknown game.
As long as reviewers keep giving great scores to *****ty games, then developers won't feel like they've failed and continue to release these bull***** games.
This was posted Friday and there's been no updates. Its now Monday, where's the news?
Its not like there's been no Gaming news. Seeing as Spore, STALKER: Clear Sky and Mercenaries 2 were released Friday, and Merc 2 has already caused trouble in London. I had to read that in a newspaper so come on, chop chop, need new news thanks.
I understand where this is coming from. A developer has every right to make his game sound awesome. Reviewing is nothing BUT advertising a game. If you pay the right amount you get a good amount of great review space. BUT the publisher should have NO place in paying for good reviews. Its disgusting! They make enough money on whatever the hell they are selling, it doesnt matter to them. Anyway, I have left reading reviews a LONG time ago. They are pretty much just another person's opinion. I have my own opinion. I don't need someone else's opinion to make me choose what game i buy.
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PS Sunday is a very silent day for news. dont expect much.
hahah funny after a while i never actually read the reviews from the big sponsored gaming sites (gamespot, ign, etc . . . ). i only used them for screenshots and such. the scoring system is horrendous. whomever pays the most gets the highest score simple as that.
it's so obvious they are just another outlet for advertising. they give unfair bias to the "big releases" yet give 3 paragraph *****ty reviews to lesser known games, if they get a review at all.
i'm actually suprised it's only coming to the surface now. they are right there is no actual journalism in most reviews. you get just as much info reading the back of the goddam video game box.
your kind of crap is why alot of game companies are where they are. they aren't making any money. don't give me the "but they make no games worth buying bs" . . . even if they did most pirates would still steal it and somehow justify it by saying "i'm sure they've sold enough copies anyways and since i already have the game i dont need to buy it."
it's a never ending cycle. they make games of inferior quality because there's budgets are cut back because of losses from piracy. i'm just saying in general. you dont have to buy all games. of course there is crap out there. but it seems only companies like blizzard have the funding to truely release good games despite piracy (well they do have pretty good anti piracy meseaures if you want to use bnet)
you seem to be forgetting that most people who pirate games are choosing between only two options.
not buying it, or not playing it
which do you think devs would prefer?
and in a lot of cases thats just what the "journalists" do.
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