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L.A. Times on Game Reviewer 'Playola'
madmancarman writes "Celebrity parties, target practice with automatic weapons, and free trips to spend the night in haunted castles are just some 'perks' game reviewers enjoy as described by this article from the L.A. Times. The reviewers say this has no effect on their reviews, but we've all heard politicians say the same thing with respect to their jobs. Maybe Ion Storm should have spent some more money on Daikatana junkets?"
What, Ion Storm was going to send reviewers 50-pound sacks of buffalo crap in anticipation of Daikatana's release?
Bowie J. Poag
I'm all for it. Where do I apply for this job? I have the highest ethics....for sale.
Joe Carnes
Yeah, why can't they all follow the greatest role models of fairness and incorruptibility in games, the International Olympic (was I allowed to use that word?) Committy.
Entertaining the press is probably not necessary, I doubt games like Half-Life, Q3, GTA3, need to bribe the press in order to ensure positive reviews. The smoozing the press strategy is probably helpful for games that can't sell on themselves or had a negative media reaction initially.
At a minimum, these activities surely dilute the pen's proverbial poison when games are finally reviewed. Now I know why magazines like Gamepro, EGM, etc. rarely give a score under 6 on a scale of 1-10...If they give low scores to games from a big company they might not be invited to hang out with Heidi Klum at the Namco mountain retreat.
-Aaron
Some people (like game testers) have a "job" that pretty much anyone can do, and is fun in the process. You don't need an education either, and it's good pay. I guess a game tester is analogous to being, say, "a vagina tester" for porn movies... just want to make sure we're only releasing "quality" stuff out there...
Shouldn't there be more stringent requirements for this? Like, shouldn't you need a degree to basically have fun, or are we leaving all the moderately-paying fun jobs to the lose dropouts (excluding those that become *nix sysadmins, of course).
Maybe a little offtopic, but...
I never really understood the need for game reviews. The reviews, in my experience, never come close to when I actually play the game. It goes without saying that games are subjective and everyone's initial reaction depends upon a bunch of random variables. I always keep this in mind if I ever read a review.
Besides, I always have some friend who ends up beta testing or just buys the game, and that ends up being the best review I ever get.
I'd hate to see what the junket was like for Grand Theft Auto 3...
Man, and I was wondering why all of the game reviewers kept obsessing about that "pick the hooker up in the car" trick.
I'm still waiting for my payoffs.
Seriously, while there is the danger of that - and I've been to a few events (like when they brought out the models dressed like Hooters girls to promote the terrible Hotters racing game) that do offer goodies.
The problem is, both reviewers and companies know you won't last long if you give a good review to a rotten game. It does happen that a reviewer likes a game that nobody else does, or hates a game that everybody else seems to like.
But most of the time, reviewers have to be honest, or else nobody will respect them, and then you lose readership. So all that these perks is that when you say "This game fucking sucks", you say "I just didn't seem to get into it". Instead of "The AI was dumber than Cattottop on Crack", you say "The AI wasn't challenging".
Lucky for some of us who run web sites out of our own pocket (yes, I'm self promoting damn it, and sorry about it), but at least when you don't actually "work" in the industry, you're allowed to say that the best part of Final Fantasy X was Lulu's cleavage every time she bent over. The rest of the game was so-so, but that alone kept me playing.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
L.A. Times on Game Reviewer 'Playola'
Posted by chrisd on Friday April 12, @01:09AM
Evangelion Reviewed In LA Times
Posted by Hemos on Thursday April 11, @10:46PM
Two posts in a row with "L.A. Times" in the title. They must have some damn good writers or something.
Anyway, I just found this interesting and it's probably a simple coincedence. Off to bed...
:-)
Feeling Lucky?
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Perhaps this is why games with big budgets become more successful than indie games that can't afford to buy their way into the review rags despite how good/bad they are.
For example, one could argue that Q3A was just another Quake, but it got all kinds of press. Kohan, though, was a great game, but very few people have ever heard of it.
Also, there are several great open source games (Crystal Space, FreeCiv, BlueMango, FlightGear, Frozen Bubble, etc.) that are really good. Of course, since they're open source and can't afford to send out "press kits" to magazines and reviewers, they never get reviewed, and never get seen outside of a very small niche.
White Hat Research
Geek clothes at Low Prices. WHR Swag and more
gotta love the extension used by that URL
.story
If a magazine or website is going to be fair and open about their reviews, it would be nice if there was a bit of disclosure about perks/payoffs that they are getting. I have seen (can't remember the site) situations where EMPLOYEES of game houses have written full reviews and palmed them off on gaming sites as a unbiased review.. only to be caught out by some alert reader.
Maybe too, people are going to hold back on reviews that shitcan bad products for fear of litigation (PetsWhoreHouse etc...). It does seem that a lot of big game sites tend to get more sychophantic as the years go on.. especially to the big software houses.. is that because of either a) Advertising Revenue (Biting the hand that feeds) or b) the junkets get better..
It gets harder to find objective reviews ESPECIALLY in print magazines..
But what can you do???
sigh
Burma?
Buy anything with the words Zelda on it, avoid anything with the words Real Time RPG Combat System (no such thing exists. . . . . THEY ARE CALLED ADVENTURE GAMES DAMNIT) and try to ignore the irony that those two critera present to one another. :)
:) )
(that and I avoid sports games. Unless they include killing or serious maiming, because killing and serious maiming are always cool. RobotWars forever!!! w00t! Man I _SO_ want a Baseball game that I can just pull a Glock out in the middle of and shoot that bastard running to third.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Do you honestly think namco gave a damn that they said the plot for time crisis 2 was a little thin?
Have you ever actually played the game?
It's like saying the plot for quake 3 was thin, yeah, sure, it was...
So?
Yeah, I spent a couple of years "in the biz". I was not paid, but worked voluntarily on an online-only game rag that has since bitten the dust. Anyway, before the speculation gets too thick on this thread, I'll throw out some info on the job of game reviewer, and how the subject of perks and such fit in.
Our mag was not one of the biggies, though we had a pretty fair readership. Aside from the publishers sending us games, and hardware companies sending us joysticks and stuff for review, there was not much else. Much of the hardware had to be returned after the write-up, but the games didn't. So, sure, I didn't buy a game for a couple years, and ended up with a few controllers and even a few sound and video cards.
The print guys definitely got more attention from the publishers, especially at E3, where they all got the special invitations to the vendor parties, and they may have even gotten some of the perks that the article implies, I don't know. The parties we did get invited to were often much like those timeshare gigs where you have to listen to a bunch of marketing hype in order to get a few chicken nuggets and two free beers, and maybe a can cooler printed with the game logo.
There was no real incentive to skew reviews. We got more games than we could reasonably play, and kept getting them from a publisher even if we had just poo-poo'd one from that publisher. One thing we tried to do, was to be objective. No game is completely bad, and we tried to point out any good points, even if the overall score was low. For instance a game might have had crappy controls, bad graphics, poor AI, and even an ugly box, but if it had good audio and soundtrack, we said so.
Then, the publisher would quote the line that said "Killer soundtrack and realistic audio effects..." on the "press" section of the game's web site and they just wouldn't mention that we thought the thing was sheer tedium to play. And they would send us another box full of games the next week.
If I had not written fair, honest reviews, pretty soon, no one would believe me. It makes no sense to lie to your readers. It was funny, I would usually head out on the web to read the other site's reviews of a game after I had posted mine. More than once I would flame a particularly bad game, only to find that some other guys were raving about it. I wondered at the time if there was some sort of "playola" going on or if my opinions were just that much different. But I never ran across any proof.
Incidentally, as for game reviewing = "vagina testing", well, allow me to dispute that somewhat. First of all, I often had been assigned two or three games per week. Which means I almost never finished a game, since I also have a day job and a family. Had this been my living, I imagine I would have had considerably more assignments, and so the result would have been the same. Also, you have to write the reviews, which takes time, writing skill, and overall, a desire to write. I dare say that not everyone who wants to play lots of games also wants to produce the equivalent of an english paper after each one. Luckily, I can spell, and write reasonably well, and so I enjoyed the writing as well as the game playing.
Of course to write a critical review, you must do more than just play. You must play while honestly evaluating the various elements of the experience, and maybe even pausing to take notes, or replaying a section just to verify some item or glitch you did not get a good look at the first time.
Often you are playing beta or even alpha quality games for previews, and so crashes and configuration hassles are not uncommon. You don't generally have time to play much on advanced levels, because you want to get to as much of the game environment as you can in a short time.
Yes it was a lot of fun, especially at first, and rewarding most of the time, but it was definitely not the easiest, sweetest gig you could imagine. Eventually, I burned out, and bid the reviewer's podium adieu. It was at least a year before I played another computer game after that.
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
Look at the 'top' PC games of the year. Sierra's Arcanum won PCGamer RPG of the year, yet its one of the worst released. The graphics are mid 90's, the gameplay is terrible.
Then there's Black&White which won best PC game of the year from several places is nearly impossible to control, and while cute, has little real gameplay.
On the other hand, there's Gothic, a German import, which was great, and if it wasn't best game of the year, it was far better than the two mention above, yet it got terrible reviews by the rags.
Its infuriating because I went out and bought those games on the reviewer say-so, and would never have even looked at Gothic had I found the others so bad I needed anything for a fix.
I think the article really only touches the surface of the problem. Many of the rags are completely in the pocket of Sierra and EA its clear. Another problem is that they rate games before their release, based on beta copies. Thus there is absolutely no way they can honestly rate the games because they only get through the intro, which in fact is nearly always good in the big name games.
Also, I have seen obvious ballot stuffers and fake raters on the web sites, even the 'honest' ones. The game companies (one starting with M comes to mind) clearly stuff the votes with gushing reviews that pretty much quote their own marketing hype, and never say anything specific about the game. For example, go find the first-day reviews which mention no load screnes for Dungeon Siege. No gamer would ever rate that as a priority in the game, especially after the first game..obvious stuffing.
I love metacritic.com, because it allows me to quickly glance at all major review scores (converted to percentage scale) for any given game. I feel taking the "average" of these reviews is a good approach to finding the truth about the latest game.
-jc
I cannot believe anyone would actually publish a review for a game they had barely finished! Would you publish a review for a book when you had only read the first chapter?
The game companies count on loosers like you doing the review, always looking for something good to say, and not finishing the game. The big companies do a great job on the game intro, so anyone who just played a few minutes thinks their great. Arcanum comes to mind. It starts out great, but turns into garbage real fast; no doubt the reviewers were like you, and only played the first couple of minutes.
Movie reviewers are often given junkets to premieres, interviews with movie stars, etc. There is a whole segment of movie reviewer who seem to take the goodies in exchange for quotes that can be put in the ad. Quote whores who get their names in the movie ads get a degree of fame and, paradoxically, credibility. That this marketing model is being transferred to the game industry is not surprising.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
The "Submachine Gun Course" they are referring to is this one (I think):
http://www.frontsight.com/1day_smg_course.htm
It's done by a company called FrontSight and it's free. The course is about five hours training (most of it on the range), and then a two hour pitch about signing up for more courses. You don't have to stay for the two hour pitch if you don't want to.
I was in Vegas for a bachelor party and attended the course, and I must say it is very well done. The instructors are actually very nice, normal people. What really surprised me about them is that they are extremely courteous and helpful. They won't yell at you when you do something wrong like a lot of ranges. (I assume with the obvious exception of things that are outright dangerous)
...that they write these reviews for...
And before you blame me for accusing them, trust me on this one. First of all, I work in the video game industry. A lot of people I've worked with used to work in magazines doing reviews and such. Needless to say I was a bit shocked (though looking back I shouldn't have been) to hear them all ADMIT that they've reviewed games based on the box art, intro sequence, or just what they think it'll be like.
Ouch
Never have I heard of a sports-caster go home during half time to write up a review of the game, but this is what the game industry does regularly.
The magazines I worked on didn't play that game but in the ultra-competitive British games magazine industry, there were several who most certainly did. I remember in particular being pretty sweet with GT Interactive's PR with regards to TA: Kingdoms. I was a massive fan of the former game and thought I had an understanding that I would review this game for our magazine first because I had the best background. Bingo it turned up on the cover of another magazine, exclusive review with a Big Score.
I couldn't even review the game, it had too many show stopping bugs namely the fact that it ran at about 25% normal speed. The game sucked anyway. Up until that point I was sufficiently naive to believe that everyone was like me. The process of getting reviews for the blockbusters is very much a business negotiation in the UK. Mags barter scores (I assume, although I never saw it myself), pages, coverdisk space and cover realestate.
Still, at the end of the day if you buy a mag and it says a game is great when it's absolutely crap - then you wont buy that magazine right? That's what I don't quite get about American magazines. They've always been very bum licky crawly to publishers, but then again their reviews are pretty useless coming out 2 months after a game hits the shelves anyhow...
Later on, after I escaped journalism to work in the games industry properly, I came to realise a real home truth. Actually reviews are pretty irrelevant. In this day and age, under 20% of those buying games have EVER bought a magazine for their console, still less have looked at a web site.
Yes, but a *lot* of game designers start out as lowly QA game testers, and work their way up to the point where they can help design projects and eventually do their own. Very few people start as a game designer. It is a destination, not a launching point.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
//disc: I am an Australian journalist who
//works fulltime for an Ozzie PC magazine.
Articles like this really annoy me. They take the actions of several PR companies, the reactions of certain journalists/game reviewers/industry observers, pick one or two of the more outlandish *stories* and then proceed to generalise across the entire damned industry.
Let me tell you right now: the actions of PR companies, game publishers/distributors and other parties interested in getting favourable attention from gaming and hardware journalists does NOT have much of an affect on the majority of the PC mag industry. At least, thats the case here in Australia.
Case in point: A company holds a press party for their latest game. They invite a bunch of journalists, put on free drinks and food, throw a few PCs around with playable demos of the code and generally hold a shmooze-fest. People eat, drink, be merry and discuss everything under the sun - naturally including the product they are there for in the first place!
Party finishes. Journalists go home. A few weeks later, the gold code arrives. Editor picks a staffer to review the game, and he/she takes it home to play the S*#T out of for a week or more - whatever it takes to finish the game.
The journalist then proceeds to write his/her review. Said review passes through subedit and a few other misc publishing routines, and appears in the next issue of the magazine.
In my experience, parties and junkets are the norm when a company wants to promote its latest product - whether that be the latest router or the next hot FPS shootemup. However, these parties usually don't promote the product they are organised for!
Damn near every promotional party/trip i can remember had one affect and one only - networking. The entire reason journalists turn up to these events is simply because they meet new people, gain new contacts and thus extend their usefullness to their own company! We emphatically do NOT think to ourselves "wow, that party/trip overseas/weekend in a hotel rocked! I'm going to give this game/hardware/widget 90%!"
Anyhow, to sum up: the article is pure BS. Journalists possess something called ethics. Those who don't, aren't journalists for long. Once you lose credability in this industry, no-one - and I mean no-one - will touch you. In short: you're fucked.
Don't lable an entire industry corrupt because of a few over-extravegant parties/trips. Fine, if one or two individuals bias their reviews due to trips/parties, then they deserve all the ridicule in the world. It won't matter all that much anyway, as they will be out of a job before long if they continue on that tack.
We have ethics. We have morals. We do not bias reviews based on how good a time a company has shown us previous to sending us product. And don't you dare bloody insinuate that we do!
Janie took my gun...
...I was invited by a friend who's a game reviewer to Microsoft's little self-congratulatory gig in SF yesterday (Bungie got a platinum disk for a million copies sold).
Anyway, the reviewers there were bitching like mad about the article, because it was taken totally out of context - yeah, there's payola for front covers and the like, handed out to the high ups in the press, but the average reviewer is lucky to get a flight and a shared bedroom on a lot of the junkets.
On top of that, the reviewers don't typically earn very much at all - and the last year has been real bad because of the decline in content providers. I got the impression not many of them make over $30 or $40k... in a good year (my friend made $10k last year). There's free food and trips which make up for it a little, but no-one seems to do it for the kickbacks. The general impression was that for the LA Times it was an extremely unbalanced article.
Winton
I don't hold quite the same viewpoint as the author of this article. First, I see nothing wrong with a journalist being expected to cover a game from a company that hosts one of these events... as long as his coverage is itself unbiased. It is standard practice for publications to be sent products for review prior to their release. The marketing department in every company in every industry has various 'goodies' to help push their products, whether they're as small as a golf ball, beer koozie or t-shirt, or as big as a free laptop, or even a trip to a haunted castle. The fact is, I've been writing a monthly tech column for an independent website over the past year. Each month, I work to find an interesting, relevant, and timely topic to cover. Sometimes hardware, sometimes software (including games), and a little bit of free exposure would really make that work a lot easier. My outfit is small enough that I'm not even paid for the work, and I have no budget, so it's that much tougher. On top of this, journalism can be a thankless job. It's not uncommon to hear complaints, but it is very very seldom that many journalists hear positive feedback from their readers. So, what's wrong with an extra perk here and there?
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
It's good to see that this problem is getting more attention -- deservedly so -- and it's being recognized as such.
I wrote about it in February in response to a previous Slashdot article on magazines faking game reviews. But the larger problem is that this highly suspect practice is rampant with consumer technology product reviews. In a best-case scenario most so-called reviews are based on a cursory glance at a given piece of technology, instead of an authentic review.
In brief (in case you don't have time to read my somewhat lengthy previous comments), we started Geartest.com because of the problem of fictional and heavily biased reviews that amount to regurgitated press releases. I wrote about some of the difficulties we've had in getting the cooperation of companies despite our growth and consistently high traffic levels, and some of the 'hints' we received about how we could get their cooperation.
Our review philosophy is simple: Real gear. Real world. Real reviews. No reviews of products based on press releases or in a pre-release stage. We use the products for an extended period in real conditions. Then we write about the results, with updates as warranted based on extended usage. That means if a product is good we say so, if it sucks we say so, but we also talk about the shades of gray where most items fall.
Now this problem of compromised 'reviews' and 'reviewers' is not new. The press covering the automotive industry has been criticized for similar problems but as that industry matured, reporters have -- for the most part -- come to understand that their only assets are their credibility and good name. Cautionary tale: Andersen with the whole Enron debacle. Though it reviewed and certified finances instead of technology products, Andersen went from being the most trusted and widely respected auditing firm to being poison because it compromised its integrity.
I'm reminded of a couple of items I saw on a regional TV newcast during the last year. The news program serves millions of people. The health and science report was a four-minute segment on a new breath freshening product under the guise of a report on halitosis -- bad breath -- after which the on-air personalities (I won't call them journalists) proceeded to try the aforementioned 'revolutionary' breath product. The segment was the only thing that was noisome. The second item, was a 7-minute segment on a brand-name SUV 'boot camp' that was being offered to consumers for 'free' -- except for the 1 to 5 hours required to complete various elements of the simulated off-road course while test-driving the SUV line-up for that manufacturer. Never mind the fact that hardly any SUVs see terrain more difficult than a gravel shoulder. It was just another puff piece that was free advertising for a company that wanted to get consumers to come to its facility where salespeople would have a captive audience.
Let's be clear: writing about an industry and its products is a symbiotic relationship by its very nature. If you can't get access to the people and products that you are supposed to be writing about, then it becomes very difficult if not impossible to review those very items. Conversely, without coverage of their offerings by trusted media, consumers might overlook a given company's products. At Geartest.com we make it simple. Give us access to your product, answer any questions we may have, do not interfere with our process, and you will get a fair review. The concept that a fair review doesn't always guarantee a favorable one causes many to balk.
For some reason computer gaming seems to be among the areas where this happens most frequently. That industry is among the most resistant to provide access without a guarantee of a rave review. Our review policy instantly scares many marketing drones off when they are accustomed to dealing with pliable and willing 'reviewers.'
Of course you have reviewers at the exact opposite extreme that strive for excellence. Consumer Reports is among the best-known and most trusted examples of reviews with integrity. A healthy, skeptical and critical approach -- if not a slightly adversarial one -- is good for consumers, reviewers, and even for manufacturers who are interested in building high-quality products and a trusted brand.
One of our staff members is participating in a journalism conference next week where one of the policy sessions aims to (in part) address the problem of junkets and payola-based product reviews that amount to nothing more than free advertising. It will be interesting to see what the resultant ethical policy and statement of principles will say about reviewing commercial products.
Whatever the outcome at the conference, we're determined to stick to our review philosophy because we honestly believe it serves everyone's best interest. On another note, we're working on a new site design and have a number of products under review at the moment, with several more waiting in the wings. There are some managers out there who understand and endorse our approach, though it would be nice if there were more.
Please check us out and let us know what you think -- What you like, don't like and where we can improve. After all, we're not above being reviewed ourselves. =)
Which magazine would you buy based on these covers:
Now, which one is more likely to be honest?
You see the problem yet? No? Look in a mirror.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Don't you get it?!
IT'S FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When it comes to mags, you only need ask yourself a few select questions:
- Does it have a FREE CD?
- Does it have the word "Exclusive" somewhere on the cover?
- Does it have a "complete walkthough" of your "favorite game"? ("complete" being a relative term, naturally)
If so, you must buy right away, otherwise a competing magazine might have even BIGGER fonts and you'd waste your $13/8£ on the old one when you could get the NEW one now, I mean, then!Yeah, right.
Amiga Power was excellent, simply excellent. Unfortunately, they sufered because of their honesty.. when they didn't rush round the latest media darlings (Team 17, at the time) and give glowing reviews like every other mag out there at the time to every single Team 17 game - Team 17 flatly stopped sending them material to review.
There was another comapny fuss with them as well... Don't remembe the name of the company but the game was called "Valhalla" Top down game thats main points were that it was coded from scratch in a week and that the main character talked at everything he did - AP gave it 18% while every other mag gave it in the 90's.
And AP were right, the game did suck.
Amiga Power WAS funny though - remember Isabelle Rees? The Matt Bielby golden era? Cam Winstanley's cries of "Hoora!! Tankie Tankie!!" (and his breakfast sandwich recipie)? Stuarts hair?
Thems were the days.
Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow...
It's good to see that Computer Gaming World is one of the few magazines with the ethics to avoid this kind of thing.
I bought a subscription to CGW a year or so ago, and I was immediately impressed with the maturity, intelligence, and humor of the articles - but I didn't realize how rare these qualities were in the video game review business. More recently, I gained access to a number of other video game magazines, and the contrast is amazing. Most video game magazines seem to be targetted at 12 year-olds.
If you're a 30+ year-old gamer, CGW is an excellent magazine. Actually, I don't even play that many video games these days, but the entertainment value of the magazine alone keeps me reading it even those times when the content may not be relevant to how I spend my time.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I used to review games for a rather large online RPG site. None of this stuff ever happened, and this was when people thought the net meant money. We were lucky to get review copies of the games, let alone to fly in an F-16. We had to buy our own E3 press passes, the games, everything. Most of the site's budget went to bandwidth, then to games. Nobody got paid, we reviewed the games because we enjoyed playing them.
After playing so many games, you start noticing what to look for, and it bugs you not to tell other people. Heck, I got the shit flamed out of me for giving Zelda 64 an 8.5 (which I still think it deserved.) I want to know where this "playola" was, and why didn't I get any? I have a feeling that this may be an isolated incident, because I know a lot of game reviewers working for prominent newspapers/websites, and none of them even hear stories of this stuff. Sure, there are some perks, usually a trip to E3 or Comdex or some other large expo, but nothing on the magnitude this guy is claiming.
If there are people out there who get this kind of treatment, it's sad. Most gamers I know don't even read reviews, game purchases are decided on word-of-mouth. Jedi Knight 2 is a perfect example. I didn't buy it because of the reviews, I bought it because everyone I knew was really excited about it and it looked cool to me. After I bought it I discovered it got rave reviews, but that was an afterthought. Gamers have an eye for spotting a good game, we don't need a reviewer to tell us what's good and what's not. Besides, mainstream media coverage of games is often horrible. I'll take word-of-mouth anyday.
It's not "payola" that's the issue, it's that there aren't many good game reviewers out there. Remember, most game reviews are for magazines targeted at junior high kids. And the "mature" game magazines all tend to read like Maxium.
Most reviews I read on the web make me cringe. Sometimes the reviewer has weird personal beefs, like Intel vs. AMD, nVidia vs. ATI, or whater. Often there are strange misinterpretations of technical issues, as if the reviewer really really wants to be a game developer but doesn't have a clue. "Bad art" is sometimes blamed on low resolution textures, low poly count, etc., when it's really just bad art. And it's just so easy for a great game to get blasted for some personal peeve, like a dead body having a leg that intersects a wall. If you get that anal retentive, then you're not going to be happy with _any_ game.
I never really understood the need for game reviews. The reviews, in my experience, never come close to when I actually play the game.
Because it's illegal to rent PC games in the USA, that's why. The first sale doctrine (17 USC 109) makes an exception for copyright holders of PC software, allowing them to monopolize all rentals of their software. (Rentals of software designed for computers sold explicitly as Video Game Consoles are subject to ordinary first-sale rules.) Yes, in theory, it's possible to license those rights, but I've never visited a rental shop that has done so.
Because not everybody has eight hours to spend online downloading a 120 MB game demo, and not everybody has upwards of $200,000 to spend on moving to an area where broadband is available.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Being a game reviewer is a WAY easier job than being a game tester. If you ever think different, imagine a job consisting of 2 days at least where you have to run through your least favorite part of your favorite game, making sure all the commas are in the right place, and that the word you thought was spelled wrong that flashed by in the upper left corner of the screen for a 1/2 was actually spelled wrong...with no save areas for the next 15 minutes.
Or better yet, take a game where you've beaten the crap out of a game...I mean, totally played it to death, as part of your entertainment life. Then you get hired by a company to do the expansion pack, and the first thing you have to do is look through the previous version of the game for bugs...that the dev team won't fix now.
The biggest problem with being a game tester is that the clueless people above you, you know, the Marketing types responsible for shipping your games out ahead of their completion, think the same thing, that you're just in there playing games. Most companies exclude QA from the perks, respect, and courtesy provided to even the temporary secretary.
QA is essentially a thankless job, a job that every one out there playing a game thinks they can do better than you. Take Fallout 2, for example. Remember how buggy that game was? How it would crash right off, and the back half of the car would travel with you wherever you went? Well on the Message Boards who did everyone blame? The developers? Marketing? No, they blamed the testers, as if every tester cooped up at Interplay for 12+ hours a day didn't notice the back of the car following them along on every screen. And Interplay never said, "Wait, this isour fault in upper management...we pushed the game out too early." They just sat there and let QA take it.
The sad fact is, that a lot of people in QA are seriously unqualified for the position. You get high school dropouts and the like in there. The company I started testing with asked that we all have some sort of college. All you people who run around in Counter-Strike and can't tell which "your" to use, or which "its", you cannot be game testers...grammar and spelling are important parts of game testing, and probably result in over 50% of all bugs written up for any given game that isn't fighting.
Not to mention that no company makes 100% hits. Wanna spend the next 6-9 months of your life telling John Romero that Daikatana sucks while he does nothing to fix it? How about playing some Chocobo Racing or Chocobo Dungeon 2 for 3 months? And who wants a nice big side of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 3D? Remember, a lot of the video game companies don't make just games...they're edutainment companies, too.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
My favorite example of a bough review coming back to bite the company who wrote it in the ass is PC Gamer's review of Outpost.
When the game was first reviewed, the game got an Editor's Award, or whatever PC Gamer gives paid advertisers. Then, 3 years later when they list their worst games of all time, which game is #1?
Outpost.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Every month or two there's a "PC game reviews are all fixed and corrupt" story on Slashdot, and occasionally I see such stories other places as well. This one made me start thinking about other types of reviews, and whether they're subject to similar "corruption". The ones that come to mind quickest are movie reviews, of course.
One of my favorite sites is Rotten Tomatoes. Basically, they collect every movie review they can find about every movie that comes out, then rate each review on whether it is overall positive ("fresh") or overall negative ("rotten"). RT then gives the movie a rating representing the ratio of positive to negative reviews. So a movie that has 90% of the reviews marked as "fresh" gets a score of 90%. Movies that have a rating of 60% or higher are themselves declared "fresh", but 59% or below and they're "rotten". RT also takes a subset of the reviews for each movie, called the "Cream of the Crop," which represent reviews by "major" sources, like the LA Times, NY Times, Entertainment Weekly, CNN, USA Today, Chicago Sun-Times (Roger Ebert), and so on, and calculates a rating for just those reviews. (The "other" reviews, which represent the bulk, tend to be from smaller, less well-known sources, and as such include people who are not necessarily career movie reviewers.) It's interesting to see the contrasts between the Overall rating and the Cream of the Crop rating.
I haven't done anything even remotely resembling a statistical analysis, but from my experience, the Overall ratings tend to be fairly well-distributed. I always see the claim that video game magazines tend to give better reviews because they fear that game companies won't advertise (or send them free games) if they don't give them good reviews (or at least if their reviews don't average up to "pretty good"), but since movie reviews tend to be in newspapers, AND since movie ads have the showtime listings attached to them, there's much less of a probability that "review well or we won't advertise" will happen.
As an example, there are 10 movies opening this week that have enough reviews for RT to give them an overall score (I believe that they don't rate a movie until they find 6 reviews for it). They are:
- Changing Lanes (75% Overall, 67% CotC)
- Frailty (82%, 100%)
- The Sweetest Thing (29%, 20%)
- New Best Friend (7%, 0% - ouch)
- Time Out (88%, 88%)
- The Cat's Meow (79%, 86%)
- Maryam (75%, 71%)
- The Piano Teacher (74%, 86%)
- Human Nature (29%, 29%)
- The Other Side of Heaven (23%, 0%)
Some movies won't have enough reviews to be statistically significant, but most movies will have 30-60 reviews attached to them by the time people stop reviewing the movie. (The numbers above may change as more reviews are found and added to their database.)
I find it a fairly useful site, actually, and RT's "meta-reviewers" do a good job -- I rarely find myself disagreeing with their opinion of the tone of a review (i.e. whether a review is overall negative or positive about a movie).
Anyway, I'm babbling, but back to the original topic... I wonder if there's any site like Rotten Tomatoes that does the same for video game reviews? I know of PC Game Review, except that it consists entirely of contributed, player-written reviews, and not "professional" reviews collected for analysis.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Exclusive reviews and coverdisk demos are what skew reviews.
This is the never-ending battle between publishing, the business of running a publication, and journalism, the profession of writing. Journalists always bitch that the biz guys are muzzling them to keep advertisers happy, and the biz guys are always pissed that journalists don't get that it takes money to run the paper. They're both right, of course, but I think that commercial interests are often triumphant over journalistic ones.