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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
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
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
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?
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!
Its UI testing of the most henous kind. Its a testers nightmare because reproducability is next to none. To quote my friend "It makes you hate playing games."
On the other hand being a game reviewer would be total rock, you get to play the game a few times and tell the world what you think.
In short the parent post is 100% correct, testing sux, reviewing is much cooler.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
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.
How many times have we read in a preview that a game looked great and "once they iron out a few small bugs" it's going to be the next big thing?
That's because the "game media" measures quality with the dollars*polygons number. More money = better game. More polygons = better game. No story, gameplay or anything genuinely new? Who cares?
By the way, I'd guess 90% of the "mega-polygon-fests" are now done almost entirely with standard toolsets. The engines, sound, models and animations are almost all done in slick, automatic GUIs with full 3D view options and instant in-engine integration. Very little actual "down to the metal" programming going on, and if there is, it is wasted effort, since the graphics almost all look the same from a technical standpoint.
Not that there's anything wrong with this, of course. I just wonder sometimes why it takes 14 full-time people two years (and $15M) to do ten levels of artwork and customize an engine.
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)
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
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.
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?
Ronnie Regan, like many 'non-major' radio personalities, would sit in a little booth, reading the wire report of the game-in-progress, and make up the bits to go along. I.e. wire says 'Player bob at bat..strike...strike..ball...ball..strike out.' and he'd fill in the details of the gritty player stepping up to the plate, knocking the dirt out of his cleats, the sound of the crowd, the whiffffffSMACK! of the strike hitting the catcher's mitt, and so on.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.
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.
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