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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."
Why not? Publishers have been faking good games for years now...
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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Some years ago we had some similar situation when a journalist, Francis Rozange, got some acrimonious game reviews stolen, then corrected to please the announcers who would not spend a single cent for advertising in a magazine that would just let such disadvantageous reviews... ...
Actually, the French law allow a typical magazine to be classified as information-press if its percentage of ads remains lower than 66%.
Where that's becoming quite outrageous is that most "honourable" magazine maximize this percentage to 65% so that they get the bucks along with the status.
Now, the problem with the press is that the newspapers mostly belong to some big media lobbies
So, I wonder why one should be surprised of such headline...
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Most games mags get "special" versions of the game at least a month before the game goes gold, along with a list of things that will be fixed before it hits the shops (frame rate improvements, bugs fixed, etc.).
The only time mags get final versions are if:
(a) The game is finished long before its release (i.e. they are delaying the game for the Xmas rush).
(b) The mag in question can't be trusted to ignore the faults in their review copy (mainstream "lifestyle" mags for example)
If you look carefully at the screenshots they use you will occasionally see how they are subtly different to the finished product.
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").
It's obvious that Eternal Darkness skated much better than Half Life2 and that tripple Lutz was obviously a mess. I blame the judges they made their mind up way before the competition. Blame the French.
To be honest, all Game Reviews are suspect anyway, as Games magazines get review copies from the developers. If the Magazine writes bad things about a game the developer has been pinning big bucks on, the developer gets pissed off and stops supplying review copies (as well as other perks like invites to seminars, launches and other Things To Write About) to that Mag.
Essentially, the safe option is to spout whatever Press Release blurb the developers give you right back, translated through a Journalist with maybe 2 hours experience of that game. Just enough to put a personal spin on the Party Line.
If you're an online review site not out to recover printing costs, it's not quite so crucial to your bottom line to pander to the games developers, but for a print mag whose very existence depends on them, the guy who gets the first exclusive sneak peek because the developer likes his mag, shifts more copies of his publication.
So, if the developer says "Hey, want an exclusive sneak peek in return for saying what we want you to say about something you can't really test properly anyway?" most Editors are going to jump up and down singing "Free Content! Gimme Gimme Gimme".
And then theres the guy who writes a review because he's a writer, based on what his mate said about the game, but he's a different story.
Chris.
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?
To be honest, I just take this kind of thing as read. Here in the UK it seems to be par for the course that certain unscrupulous magazines will review unfinished code (favourably in most cases) and in some instances, you get the impression that the reviewer hasn't even seen the game. The cynic within suspects that deals for advertising may have been done...
One incident that sticks in my mind is the CUAmiga review of Elite: Frontier, which scored very highly, yet there was no mention whatsoever of the showstopping bugs that ruined the game. Having said that, CUAmiga was usually one of the more trustworthy magazines.
http://www.davetansley.com - you proba
Dont be so hard on these magazines, guys.
Maybe the editor's keyboard got messed up, and the key "p" stopped functioning.
It seems difficult to get true unbiased reviews of games these days. After all, it's in the interest of the magazine publisher to keep a good relationship with the game developer, because a) they want to sell advertising space to these people and b) they want to be invited back to see the next games. I've been in games development for several years now and I've seen reviews vary from 20% to 90%, depending on whether the journalist was taken to lunch or not. Also, in the rush to be first to cover a new game, they can create a preview with the skimpiest of factual information on the game design. That's always fun when the end result has varied considerably from the initial design.
The fault is probably equally shared between games developers and the magazines that (p)review their games. I just try to remember to these facts while reading reviews, and bear in mind that those lovely screenshots have probably been carefully selected and touched up by artists on the project. Who knows, you might really enjoy a game marked as mediocre by the reviewer because it's something that he or she personally doesn't like all that much. Best to wait and read the comments from people who have bought and played the game, on the forums and newsgroups out there.
"Oh god. Oh god. Daikatana is great. The game is incredible. Please keep it coming. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, keep on fragging. Boring medival Japanese plotline, oh god. More, more, more!!!
Good Salad."
See, it's quite easy to fake a good game review.
Jeez! I can flip to CNN for that!
The only difference between these guys and every second person on the web is that they're getting paid to do it.
Except, weirdly enough, in this case, I can't actually blame them.
--Game titles offer few surprises these days. Plus, the description and declared subject matter offered by the publishers to the reviewers sounds both sick and lame.
The only thing these reviewers did wrong is to not say up front that they were only looking at demos and press kit material. The fact of the matter is that they've told me all I want to know:
"Newsflash: Another cookie cutter over-violent FPS released by some company run either by (a)Sick juvenile twit programmers, or (b)Unimaginative corporate executives trying to make a buck by designing what their market analysts tell them is 'hip with the kids'."
Yep. Now that's reporting!
-Fantastic Lad
PC Gamer in Europe, especially the British version. I remember when they gave Game of The Month to some game a couple of years ago (must have been a FPS, it's the *only* thing they like - probably Messiah) which was then delayed months because of severe bugs. They have also referred in reviews to features which have been dropped in the final version of the game.
The game publishers allow it becuase it helps build hype around their games before they are published. The game magazines do it because the one to publish the review first of the currently #1 hyped game sells lots of extra issues. The gamers do it because appearently the majority are idiots who don't notice or don't care that they are reading a review of an alpha version mixed with rehashed press releases and official screenshots!
One of the few magazines which have tried to change the trend is Computer Games, they have a policy (at least they used to) of reviewing only released games, as they are out of the box without patches.
/Lars Westergren
I ran into a problem with folks not reviewing games when the GBA (Game Boy Advance for the un-anointed) first came out. My brother and I were trying to decide which games we should both get vs. which we should just share. Bomberman Tournament was the title we'd anticipated most, so if there was any possibility of increasing the gameplay value by buying two, we were gonna do it.
And, after a quick perusal of two of the largest gaming sites around - Gamespot.com and IGN.com - we decided two cartridges were the way to go. After all, in Gamespot's review, Frank Provo writes:
Sounds good, especially when paired with David Zdyrko's comments in IGN's review:
So, we went and bought two copies, whipped those babies out, and set up a game. And, lo and behold - no multi-cartridge support. Yes, indeed, the single gamepak mode had lots of slow load times. But having more than one doesn't do you any good unless you lose a game in the couch cushions.
There was some moaning about this issue on the Gamespot forums, and as it turns out, the multi-cartridge support had not been brought over to the US version. Some of the reviewers had been given bad data by the company.
To which I first though, "OK, no big whoop. Shit happens." But the more I considered it, the more it bugged me. These two reviewers made claims based on information they got from the company that made the game - NOT their own experiences. They didn't test these features; they just threw them into the review.
I understand the most probable reasons: lack of time, only one cartridge to test with. But all I'm asking is for a simply "We didn't have two copies, so we can say for ourselves, but apparently..." Yes, it sounds a little wussy, but it makes the difference between journalism and an ad. At the very least, they could have corrected the error when they were notified; I'm aware of several people who have contacted both sites, including myself, and one Gamespot official even bothered to reply about it in the forums, but both still stand unchanged.
OK, this is a minor thing, I know. But it did cost me about 30 bucks, and it makes me wonder: how much else in these "reviews" is straight out of a press release?
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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'Exclusive' reviews of incomplete (or in some cases entirely non-existent) games have been around almost as long as computer games magazines themselves. I remember back in the glory days of the classic UK games mags of the 80s and early 90s - the likes of ZZap, Crash, Your Sinclair, Commodore Format, Amiga Format etc - the surprise was when a review of a real, *finished* game was published (it was not unusual to see rave, 95% reviews of games which were never even written :-)
UK and Australian readers will probably know what I am talking about: I'm sure I'm not the only one who misses the zany yet sophisticated humour, and complete and utter lack of moral fibre, of the great UK games mags. The copious pop-culture references, the disturbing running gags and in-jokes, the barf-inducing layouts.... all seem to be missing from today's sanitised publications.
There was a terrific site set up by the staff of the short-lived (but truly surreal while it lasted) Amiga Power magazine, telling the inside story of the fake reviews, blatant plagiarism etc of the UK games mag scene of the period. Unfortunately it seems to have vanished.... hopefully someone might turn up with a URL.
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I should use this approach on my thesis...to think of the time I've wasted waiting for data!
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In the UK, the magazine Edge (http://www.edge-online.com) has a column called Red Eye by a veteran video game journalist.
About six months ago the column was about a journalist who boasted of writing a review of a game without even playing it. According to Red Eye, the practise is remarkably common - as magazines and web sites fight to make sure they aren't caught out by scoops from others.
Red Eye also criticises video game journalists from acting like a pack. He cites Driver 2 as an example where the universally positive reviews ignored significant flaws in the game.
Anyway, just my thoughts,
*r
--- My dad's political betting
Could be worse, I guess. They could post duplicates of the same articles and reviews over and over without even checking for copies....
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As long as I can remember, I have always hated the journalistic hogwash that gets thrown into places like PC Magazine, Windows Magazine, etc. Half their articles are just buzzwords and their own interpretation of them. I'm sure there are "review lobbyists" of some sort from software publishers that push for softer reviews of their products. As an effect of this, I would guess that more products are rated highly than those graded harshly, even though a large amount of software out there is utter crap (especially closed-source commercial stuff).
Personally, I enjoy reviews from actual gamers, like the horde at shacknews. Seeing multiple opinions of a game helps put it into perspective, taking the subjecticism out. However, these types of reviews usually don't come out until after the game is released, so the first wave of gamers are usually influenced by the larger, lobbied reviewers.
I guess what im trying to say here is that waiting a little while for a game to be released and tested by the masses might be worth popping $50 for something that isn't what you expected it to be *Cough*daikatana*cough.
You'd have to be pretty bad with a calendar (and know nothing about games development) to believe that a review written at least six weeks before a game goes gold could be of anything even remotely resembling the finished version. I know for a fact that "Braveheart" was given 95% by one (ahem) reputable UK games rag based on a 10fps demo that crashed every 2 minutes and a promise that the development team was working 20 hour days to get a patch done in time for the boxes hitting the shelves (which was true, but signifies nothing).
Look, picture for a second how this works. A sales weasel turns up from the publisher bearing a package. In the package is a shitty beta version of the game, a promise that it will be fixed (so the magazine won't look like chumps), the advertising material, and a blank cheque. The cheque is ostensibly to pay for the advertising, but the number that goes on it depends on a lot of things. How many eyeballs the magazine is attracting; how understanding the reviewer is going to be about the bugs; how much the reviewer is prepared to just flat out lie; who is buying lunch for who.
The problem is really that the readers put up with it. Specifically, that we reward magazines for running rave review in every issue purely to tempt you to pick them up. Imagine a games mag with the cover page: "All the games reviewed this month suck." Would you buy it? Probably not, but that's exactly the kind of issue you should buy.
You want to know what a game is like? Play a downloadable or cover disk demo, or a friend's copy (local laws allowing, hey ho). Wait until it reaches budget, and see if people are still talking about it. I bought Diablo II + the expansion + Diablo + a strategy guide on Monday, for less than the original cost of Diablo II. Strangely enough, it's still the same game that it was when it first shipped - only without many of the bugs.
Games magazines are an irrelevance now, other than as a means of distributing advertising and cover disks. Online mags are a little better, partly because they don't have print deadlines to hit, but mostly because you can generally read player comments and get a feel for what the title is actually like.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Seriously. The people writing the game articles looked like they were -- like me -- also in thier teens. Unlike me, they had access to press releases, and did a fine job of mangling them.
As an adult, I've been interviewed by reporters and had projects I've worked on reviewed. Nothing makes me wince more then having to read something that is simply wrong -- even if it's a "positive" error. I don't lie, so why should I expect someone else, supposedly objective, to hype or lie for me?
That the articles are still being faked isn't a surprise at all. Ethics and objectivity in popular tech journalism (ZD) is rare, and sometimes missing even at the bottom of the totem pole (Mozillaquest).
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But.. But... If they're not, then why are they being sold? You aren't implying that the government would allow something dangerous to be sold to the public are you?
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Because ign.com does tons of other stuff other than video games, they don't have this problem.
I own a GC, and am certainly experienced enough not to count on reviews of games before the game has shipped. IGN is good about this stuff. They play the games, and they dont go easy on them in reivews (I've found the X-Box team at IGN is more prone to 'gloss' for bad games), I'd say that they arn't afraid of biting the hand that feeds them.
I think the key is relying on sources that are:
a) knowledgable
b) cover a broader base of interests than those you seek, such that their business doesn't rely soley on the area of interests you are seeking objective info from
is the best way to go.
But people should already be aware of this. I mean, everyone has to dance with the one that brought them to the party, so just make sure you're not listning to those who wouldn't gave gotten to the party otherwise.
"Old man yells at systemd"
We had THE scoop on the Nintendo 64 (then called "Project Reality" or "Ultra 64") -- we were the first site on the entire planet that had mockups and the Editor-In-Chief, Jer Horowitz, created an image that turned out to be EXACTLY what the N64 controller looked like.
Imagine how thrilled I was to see that image ripped off in a pair of print magazines 8 weeks later. Video Games and Computer Entertainment (now defunct) and Electronic Gaming Monthly both lifted the image and claimed it as their own. I was irate, and made some phone calls.
The publisher of EGM, Sendai Media Group (aka Sendai New Media) purchased us 6 weeks later. It was, without a doubt, the worst business decision of my life. =) Not only were we vastly underpaid (they bought Gamespot 3 months later for $10 million -- we were not paid in the millions -- or even in the hundred-thousands) but our entire culture was ripped apart.
We took advertising. Yep, people were paying for online advertising in 1994. And not $0.000003 CPM! We never let that advertising money affect our journalistic integrity. We were rock-solid. Anything that was a review was labeled as a review and we told people what state the game was in when we reviewed it.
We had news and rumors too. Guess what? All rumors had a bright green label saying "RUMOR." Hey, we got some of those wrong too -- but at least you knew that could happen going in.
Sendai was bought by Ziff-Davis. They killed the magazine in 9 months. We had 250,000 paid subscribers but everyone started hating the magazine when we became a "me too" clone. In order to be first in print we were forced to play fast and loose -- and never write anything bad about anyone spending money with us.
HARRY POTTER FIRST LOOK INSIDE!!!!!
How many magazines had that just to get a bigger buy rate? More than a few. How many of them really reviewed that dog of a game? Not too many.
Sigh. The reality of the situation is that money drives the magazine business. Very few magazines -- and none in the US -- actually cover the video game/PC software business as real journalists. They are ALL hoars to the software publishers. All of them.
Online wrestling as a trading card game? WWF With Authority.
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.