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Gamespot Goes to Subscription Model
-PS-Sangloth writes "Gamespot, arguably the best video gaming website will expand in July to a pay service(Gamespot Complete). It seems that while review scores will be free, the actual reviews for new PC games will cease to be available to non-payers 7 days after the review was written. This is a real pity, I suspect many PC Gamers, like me, don't have credit cards(or cash), and Gamespot has good, hard, objective reviews. Read what they said at
Gamespot Complete."
Easy start going to gamespy & their affiliates. The reviews are normally a little more in depth even, it's doubtful they'll ever want to charge you for reviews, & their is more than reviews you can access.
So why use gamespot if they want to charge you?
Anymore I just use Gamepsy & Gamefaqs for all my gaming needs...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
"The fact that they are losing money atleast means one good thing and is they aren't accepting money from publishers for good reviews."
Let me educate you about something...
I'm a game reviewer. While I haven't written for Gamespot, I know Greg Kasavin moderately well and know many of the people who write for him. Personally, I have experience with one magazine and two other websites. So, let me clue everybody in on how this works:
The subject of gaming publications getting funny money for knocking review scores up just isn't true. It's pure speculatory myth. Game magazines make money by selling space for those big glossy advertisements in their magazine... that's it. Also, most reputable ones don't even allow game companies to fly their writers out to the office to see game previews... usually this is done at the magazine's expense - to avoid looking like they're accepting favors and obliged to give preferential treatment.
So, they sell advertising space. In my personal experience, the one time that a company was very displeased with what I had to say in a review they did try to threaten the magazine about it - because they claimed that my accusations of the unfinished state of the game were unjust. However, my editor told them essientially "No, he's correct and we're running it as it stands." Their only means of sabre rattling was to threaten to pull advertising money out and not run their ads... well, who does that hurt worse? Them. Ok, so at that point the argument is over, the ads stayed and the review kept its score.
Occasionally there *is* a situation where an editor will adjust the score you turn in with your review. That is usually going to happen when they've read your submitted text and feel that it doesn't jive with the rating you attach to it. It's like saying "This game sucked... I give it 5 stars!" You're going to get a phone call asking what you're smoking and to please reconsider the score. If it's real close to publication date, the editor may have to make the adjustment himself. The only time I've ever seen a review score adjusted in what I call an "unjust" manner was when a certain editor (who I won't mention because I've never written for him) changed a score because he thought it was WAY out of line with what OTHER magazines were giving the game... a 2 when everyone else gave the game a 4.5 or better. Well, the writer got quite pissed and told him he couldn't change it, and the story was published INTACT at another site - with the 2 rating.
So, there's everybody's clue about what's "real" in the freelance game review writing arena.
Now, if you want to actually hang out in a forum with the majority of the magazine editors and the game writers, I'd suggest a trip over to http://www.quartertothree.com and head straight to the forums. You'll find everybody from the industry there.
Gamespot can easily prevent google from caching their pages. All they have to do is follow these instructions
I never look at their reviews anyway -- I go to http://www.gamefaqs.com/ instead. Those are user-provided reviews. For each game, they give you a table of reviews, reviewers, and scores. The scores are from 1-10. Before buying a game, I generally read the review with the lowest ranking score, the review with the highest ranking score, and a few reviews around the average. Folks there aren't afraid to say "this game sucks!".