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Magazines Faking Game Reviews?
lunchlady doris writes: "With videogames becoming a huge business and magazines having large lead times, something has got to give if they want to compete with web sites. Planet GameCube has a story where it seems that some magazines have decided that eschewing actual journalism is the way to go, with both Extreme Gamer and Request Magazine having reviews for Nintendo's Eternal Darkness, a game that is currently incomplete and is only expected to arrive in stores at the end of June."
I know someone who used to work for a film review magazine in London who said that the last year she worked there they hardly went to see any films at all. They were so understaffed that they didn't have time to see the films and wrote reviews of them without seeing them.
She got fed up and left. I think you will find this practise is not as unusual as one would hope.
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My particular addiction is NASCAR simulations. I used to love reading reviews raving about certain tracks and features being in the game, when in reality they weren't. When they touted great coding features that in reality were the opposite and serious gameplay bugs, that really cracked me up. Any player of those games would immediately have know the reviewer hadn't even bothered installing to game. As of now, I couldn't care less about magazine reviews. The critical (and sometimes overtly negative) observations made by posted in those game's forums help me out better in making my purchases. Fake journalism? Nothing new, kinda reminds me of the fake citations I had to make up for a college paper (although in this case I truly made my own observations and analysis throughout the paper, but yet the instuctor insisted on me citing people, so I "did").
I forgot to add this in as an example of other types of fakery. NASCAR Racing 2002 Season came out this Wednesday. But if you checked EB's top selling charts last week, you would have seen this game listed at #4 among the top sellers. Huh?
I have a friend who while working for a Games magazine was assigned to review an upcoming game. The game was planned to be released no sooner than two months. :). :)
So she got a copy of the "close circuit game preview" CD and thought to give it a fair ride.
It took 3 days to install the game - it was so poorly written it only worked on a single test machine and it was UGLY and slow like hell.
So acting in consequence, my friend wrote the review and give it a 3 out of 10
Suprise, surprise ! The editor was pissed and started to yell something along the lines of "yo' tryin' to ruin us or what ?!".
It turned out it was (guess still is) common practice to write good reviews in order to get early previews. You see, the magazine sells because it features early reviews, hence it has to get early game releases and has to write GOOD reviews in order for early stuff to keep coming and readers keep buying.
OTOH, the game companies obviously need to have good publicity so they use (among other stuff like PR and paid trips to nice resorts in order for editors to get a "preview" of the new stuff) this mechanism of early reviews.
Needless to say the game ended up as a complete failure, but all things considered who remembers the article that gave the game 8.8 out of 10 ?
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The quite famous (at the time) french writer
JP Manchette got away with this for three years or
more ! He wrote film critics for "Charlie Hebdo"
from a remote mountain commune, based on what
his 12 years old son would say to him on the phone, and critics from daily newspapers. So he was the only french intellectual to (rightly) praise "Indiana Jones I" or "1941" !
The critics were actually so good that they were
recently released as a book.
I think he did it as a mixture of situationnism and despise for the readers, whom he may have considered of the same mental age as his son.
He ended the game when the journal went bankrupt
by announcing a sneak preview of a Georgian stalinist movie of the late 40's, without
subtitles, in a remote suburb of Paris, staged at 11:30 PM (so everyone would miss the last subway). Pitch : love story between a sovkhoze farm worker anda tractor repairer. Indeed, he just
wanted to make fun of snob, left-wing
pseudo-intellectuals. He then revealed that
he had cheated on all of his movie reviews.
Maybe this stuff with videogames is related : journalist just exploting the sheepy attitude
of teenagers (or not grown ups 20-30 yo),
only wanting to impress their friends with
their knowledge of the newest games.
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In the case of computer magazines, they're trying to get the FIRST REVIEW!!! (a bit like First Post!) which will sell more copies of the magazine.
But sloppy work happens everywhere. David (Hutch) Soul recently successfully sued the one time showbusiness columnist of the "Daily Mirror" (crappy UK tabloid) over a review of a play Soul starred in.
The review said at the Monday performance, only 45 people turned up and the audience laughed derisively at Soul. They didn't do Monday performances...!
"Information wants to be paid"
This problem of fictional reviews is the main reason we started Geartest.com. The problem doesn't only exist with video games but with most consumer technology products. Most tech 'reviews' out there are nothing more than regurgitated press releases with 'reviewer' doing nothing more than spending a few hours of playing around with one product or another.
That's in stark contrast to our review philosophy: Real gear. Real world. Real reviews. We don't write reviews about products based on press releases or in a pre-release stage. We use the products for an extended period in real conditions. And we tell the people what we found, with updates as warranted. That means if it's good we'll say so, and if it sucks we'll say that too... but usually the truth is somewhere in between.
We have had difficulty in getting manufacturers to send products to us for review. That is despite having grown to the point where we consistently have 5-figure impression levels, projecting breaking the 100,000 impression level soon. All of that is without us doing any advertising. Pure word-of-mouth. It's no Slashdot but we think it's decent traffic.
We suspect that the biggest problem (from the point of view of manufacturers) is that they simply don't want to risk getting a negative review. We believe it's in a manufacturer's interest to receive unbiased, journalistically sound reviews of its products. Ultimately that can enhance their credibility and add value to a brand in the eyes of the product-buying public.
We have had some people suggest to us that we 'play ball' if we want their cooperation. Frankly, it's not going to happen. We may miss out on getting 'insider' opportunities to cover and review items -- and we may not get to review some items that our users have asked us to -- but the feedback and response we have received from our readership (a good mix of techies and laypeople) tells us that we are on the right track.
The way we see it is this: if you have confidence in your product, then you should have no problem putting it to an unbiased test. It's surprising how many product managers recoil and refuse when you put it to them so plainly.
We're in the process of designing our 3rd-iteration site to enhance user-friendliness and add some more features and functionality. The one thing that will stay constant is that we won't trade our integrity for 'A-list' access to products. If that means we don't get access, we'll just deal with the people and companies who see the value in what we're doing.
Check out Geartest.com and let us know what you think.