Slashdot Mirror
A Shoe To The Head For Game Journalism
On Wednesday we reported on an editorial by EGM editor Dan Hsu making claims that publications and web sites were 'selling' reviews for ad revenue. Shoe has since posted the original editorial to his blog, along with some commentary on why he makes the claims but doesn't name names. From the article: "My industry pisses me off. I was a little suspicious of the cover choices one of our competitors was making, so I checked in with a contact of mine from a major game publisher. 'Yes,' he confirmed. 'We can pretty much get whatever cover we want from that magazine. All it takes is for us to meet with the publisher, promise that we'll buy some ads, and discuss the details from there.' So...that magazine's cover stories are for sale. Great." Kyle Orland's VGM Watch steps in for some commentary on the broader picture.
No No No... Its BOOT to the head =)
I love to slaughter the english language.
I'm surprised this is considered newsworthy. Magazines devoted to video games are going to have a very vested interest in making the game companies happy, and vice versa. If "GameD00d" does nothing but rip on/ignore every game EA makes, EA can respond by pulling their ads, and GameD00d takes a serious punch in the economic teeth. On the other hand, if GameD00d knows that EA will throw some extra cash in their Christmas stockings by making a slightly-bigger-than-usual deal over "NFL Deathmatch Blastoid 2009" then *of course* they're going to do so. Let's face it - what is going to be the "next big game" is largely subjective anyhow. Nothing in the world sways a subjective opinion quite like money. So I say again: Exactly WHO didn't already know this?
The ability to communicate well does not directly correspond to the ability to communicate intelligently.
Welcome to the real world!
ANY and EVERY review magazine of ANY kind that boasts even one page of advertisement is bound to be corrupted.
And guess what, ads are an important part of the revenue stream of these publications, and it's not going to become any better. Even BLOGS are goin' adsense!
Do you know where that leads? Here's a fine example :
"If you give this game less than a 95% rating, I'll just buy my 12 pages of ads at $1,000,000 each at another gaming magazine.
- MMMph! *slurp, slurp* I couldn't talk with my mouth full, O benevolent games publisher!
- I thought so too, slave."
Okay, maybe with more cocksucking from the magazine's part.
If any of this makes your blood boil, nd you can't stand living in a society in which everything works through corruption and money talks, head over to http://www.adbusters.org/
Is it because they enjoy reading about stuff that is 2 months old?
Web publications are where real gamers go for their gaming news and reviews.
Companies are selling out to the highest bidder, and tailoring their content to be as favorable as possible to the people that back them financially!
Honestly, I didn't realize this was anything new. I always assumed that video game rags were pretty much like every other magazine out there. You throw some money around, get the coverage you want and ride the wave to profit. Just like pretty much every other publication out there. I'm sure we've all heard stories about reviewers coming clean about getting a lot of swag from game publishers that helps up their review a bit. Why would the magazine really be any different?
The days of being able to realistically expect unbiased reporting from anywhere are pretty much long gone.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Was there ever any doubt that this kind of thing happens occasionally in the game review business? Thankfully there are alternatives to basing your purchases on these big-name low-integrity publishers. Websites like http://www.metacritic.com/ or http://www.gamerankings.com/ provide averages of many collected reviews, and cannot be corrupted as easily as if you trusted a single source review. You could also take your reviews more personally and visit one of the smaller Blog type sites like the one I write for, http://www.thegamechair.com/ A volunteer run sight like ours has a double advantage, no bribery, and all of the writers are passionate about the games they play.
only one everything
You don't think there would have been a cover story on the front of the Boston Herald every day after the Xbox 360 release if some money didn't change hands, do you? What about all that coverage on CNN? I thought it was always just assumed that the gaming press was for sale. Every single month from as far back as I can remember you see some shit game get better than average reviews from the big review sites and magazines. The real news should be that the regular media is taking the bait too.
Sounds like slashdot. Or any media that depends on advertising revenue for that matter. This is why Media English is not the worthless class in (Canadian) highschool that it at first seems to be.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
All press is for sale.
Like Lew Black sez: businesses has always been sleeping with each other. It's only recently that they just stopped trying to hide it.
All the trade rags are the exact same. Car + Driver, Computer Shopper, etc etc. Why should video game magazines be any different?
Any magazine that reviews a product that features a single ad for a product it reviews is tainted.
This is why I never trust any reviews from any magazine but Consumer Reports (who buys the products they review through normal channels via secret shoppers, and who do ntot accept any advertisement swhatsoever in their maagainze, and who do not allow their reviews ot be used in advertisements).
The only web reviews I trust are blogs or reivew sites where I know the reviewer purchased the items themselves.
There is no other way to ensure journalistic integrity.
Seems a bit amusing to hear that sort of thing from EGM (no doubt referring to Game Informer) when EGM is often knocked for praising Sony excessively while trashing Microsoft. Of the publications out there, GI has far and away shown the least amount of bias, and in fact I seem to recall there being an award given to the entire GI staff last year for best video game reporting or something along those lines. GI also has the least to gain from bias, because it is a division of GameStop. If GI took a slant towards one publisher or another, then other publishers might decide not to give GameStop the volume price discounts that, say, Best Buy would get. Same with Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo.
The established way of doing it is to clearly seperate the "content" makers from the ad-sellers. Newspapers are supposed to work like this were for instance in a real paper NO amount of money will buy you an front page ad covering the entire front and every advertisement has a little header pointing it out and no advertisements accepted that look to much like the regular content.
Of course this line was blurred long ago when newspapers stopped publishing news and started adding lifestyle sections.
Were exactly does the corruption start anyway? Obviously a newspaper that carries no game reviews is probably not a good place for a game maker to advertise. So is adding a game section a way to get game makers to publish ads? What about a movie review section? You will notice that movie ads are always near the reviews. Odd, could the entire review section be a way to toady up to the movie companies?
Of course there is a way around this. Increase subscription fees. If no advertising needs to be carried because the consumer pays for all the costs then no ads are needed.
Except that doesn't work either because there is always some toad who then figures out you could even make more money by requiring both a subscription AND to sell adverts at the same time. Just look at payperview tv like the dutch Canal+. Pay for cable, pay for the decoder and still you get ads.
Ah well, luckily slashdot stands at the last bastion of free expression were no amount of money will cause the editors to sully their integrity by publishing bogus news stories to advertise a product.
God I feel dirty after saying that.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you've been involved with the gaming industry for any amount of time, it's extremely clear that magazines are pushing certain games and companies are paying for the spotlight. However, what alot of people might not know is that retail gaming companies are doing the same thing. I personal worked in a national retail gaming company, when it was called funcoland and after they got bought out, and I can tell you that is abvertising goes beyond magazines. Developing companies are paying these retail companies tons of money to place advertising cuts outs or posters in specific locations in the store. What people also don't know is that certain products are to be pushed more than others by employees. Managers are told to make sure employees mention certain games or accessories. This plagues alot of non suspecting buyers with bad game titles.
As I've stated before, the game journalism industry is corrupt and laughable. If Hsu were truly bothered by this, he'd name names. There's certainly nothing illegal about a publisher buying a magazine cover. Unethical, perhaps, but not illegal.
Why are IGNs reviews of "anticipated" titles so much longer than those non-anticipated ones? Do you really think Perfect Dark Zero deserves a 4-page review? Notice how none of the professional sites or mags talks about PDZ's complete lack of presentation (you get a screen that tells you your objective, and it's confusing as hell--I still haven't figured out how to stealth accurately in level 2!). Instead, they talk about "bad storyline and voice acting."
Positive reviews have been purchased by publishers for years, either directly or indirectly. Look at the XBox 360 line-up. The games are all getting 7s-9s, but most of them are just nothing special. I'm sure if someone compiled a list of scores from any given popular Web site for the last n years, they'd find that a 7 is an average score.
Here's the thing--if you actually sit down to read a review, you can tell whether or not the reviewer really means it. Reading Call of Duty 2 reviews, where it normally gets a high score, you can tell that they liked the game. But when I first read the reviews of Grand Theft Auto III, you could tell that the reviewer loved the game.
Readers look at the numbers. They don't read the reviews. PDZ can get an 8.4 but have bad voice acting and do nothing new. MS and Rare are happy that it got a high score.
You don't have to have a Journalism degree or really a degree at all to be in this industry. It isn't that a degree defines talent--rather those with degrees have had more ethics training than those who haven't.
Roger Ebert won't allow a studio to pay to fly him to an event. His paper pays for it. When Ubisoft flys IGN staffers (and their girlfriends/wives) to Hawaii though, well, they're not doing it because they admire IGN's writing.
Thus, the ultimate problem is there is no incentive to change anywhere in the chain. Mag Publishers need money, and game publishers need to sell games. And players continue to go to IGN/GameSpot/EGM/GI/Gamepro for their game info.
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot trolls you!
"In our interview, Hsu refused to go public with the names of the magazines and publishers mentioned in his editorial. He did note that the outlets in his examples did not include IGN and Game Informer, "who were often accused by some readers." Hsu defended his silence by saying that naming the outlets would look petty. "While I want to call them out because I want the industry to shape up, I don't want to get into petty fights. I feel like we're above that." Hsu also worried that an investigative piece looking at these accusations would not be a good fit for an entertainment magazine like EGM."
http://vgmwatch.com/?p=917
AKA Gun Tests magazine. It is simple plain white paper with BW photos, no ads. It is the only publication I know where the reviewers will actually say something like "This gun sucks. Not only does it not shoot straight, sometimes it won't shoot at all. Don't buy it".
/. goes, we all know where they stand. While suffering the same lack of any mystical "journalistic integrity' as most other news pubs, at least they are transparent and they do publish ALL the "letters to the editor" AKA the junk we write.
I wish I knew of an equivalent subscriber supported rag for cars, audio-video, etc...
Only other thing I can think of that approached this level of gall was S&E with their now legendary thumbs up or down movie reviews.
As far as the rep of the editors at
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
It looks to me like he's trying to stir things up in order to boost readership.
I never liked game magazines, hell I don't like most magazines, because they're nothing but advertising. Considering the amount of advertising in some of these magazines you'd think they could distribute them for free. I find game magazines to be some of the most obnoxious on the market, topped only by the "lifestyle" crap.
I haven't seen anything in EGM that would indicate they're any different from the rest. Even if they're not directly influencing a review by buying ad space they're doing is with all the free stuff they hand out.
A company sends you a few gifts along with a new game to review. There's a general sense of good will towards the developer that sent the nice stuff. How can they not be biased even on a subconcious level? And, that doesn't even take into account the fact that these guys don't have to pay for these games out of their own pockets.
If they want to do convincing, reasonably unbiased reviews they should be forced to go out and pay for these games out of their own pocket. When they're spending $50-$60 on a mediocre game lets see if their reviews are as positive as they are now.
Magazines in business to make money, news at 11.
-Styopa
Cor Blimey! Didja hear that?
It was the point of this article that flew over your head, back to its nest of incomprehension.
Look at gamefaqs' main page. Sometimes the whole color scheme is changed to display a commercial. Same goes for a LOT of online publications. So don't worry : the same problem applies for us, on teh intarbutt!
The worst thing about it is that people, as a great big band of sheep, completely miss the issue, or don't really care.
THESE PEOPLE ARE CALLING THEMSELVES JOURNALISTS. This is not even selling out at this point, it's prostitution.
I can honestly say after having worked for a both a large and medium sized network in an editorial and PR capacity that this is not an uncommon practice. I have been pressured by management of the site to not give a title coverage because they would not buy advertising and the reverse has also happened. Pressure from the publishers to change a review to meet a certain score or they will pull their advertising money is not something that happens every day, but it does often enough that I am surprised it took this long for someone to be very public about it.
I dunno, I always find it funny when the back cover advertizes a game that the magazine slams a few pages back. It happens all the time.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
EGM has a habit of slandering decent games because they didn't seem to appeal to the reviewer. EGM hardly ever considers whether a game might be appealing to others; like Tommy Tallerico they just act like narrow minded fanboys. It's obvious that they're attacking Game Informer - GI's editoral was about how grateful Andy McNamara (editor) was for having the best cover stories in the industry. Andy was right, too. Game Informer has had an exceptional year. Furthermore, Game Informer's reviews tend to be the only ones which lack exaggeration.
The true ad-conscious bribed reviewers are the online sources. ALL of their revenue comes from advertisements and their reviews shamelessly show it.
But it still needs to be said. There are throngs of unwashed masses out there that take the crap in these magazines seriously. I get sick of hearing people quote reviews from various news sources, as though most were legitimately awarding these games their scores.
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=170711&c id=14222701
He basically mirrored my comments and experiences in this industry, and ultimately it led to me leaving. This whole gaming business is one of the biggest shams in the world, and people - intelligent people - get suckered time and time again. Take a trip to E3 sometime to see a glimpse of the real "professionals" who work in this industry... you will lose all respect instantly.
Dan Hsu is one of the few journalists I ever had a respect for and could talk to intelligently... and I know he has left jobs to keep his integrity. Good for him to bring it to light in the media... this whole industry needs a shakedown and I'm truly hoping the Revolution is the start of a pardigm shift away from Sony/MS and graphics.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
The thing is, nobody wants to actually come out and say "XX mag is buying covers from YY." That includes Dan Hsu. As I mentioned in Games.net, the games industry is *tiny.* Everybody knows everybody else. Journalists switch from PR and back. Frankly he hasn't said anything, and I would venture to say he's afraid of the repercussions of doing so. In short, he himself doesn't want to open the can worms while saying he does. Industry integrity is weighed less than the potential of being blacklisted and avoided by every game publisher and developer.
As for reviews being bought, that's far less common and transparent than buying covers or buying coverage. Chances are, when you see an inflated score it's just a bad review by an overly enthused fan. That, or peer review bumps the score up or down a couple notches. The review process differs depending on each pub. For Gamepro, scores tend to go up as is from the reviewer (which means I've strongly disagreed with many a score--I think scores in general are too high)
Buying coverage rather than the opinion itself would probably be the more common temptation, as in "cover this story for this amount of ad dollars." Advertisers wave that over pub's heads--and with print ads in general slipping in favor of online, it's an increasing temptation to succumb to.
The print mag he was referring to is likely Game Informer who uses their in-store status at the fleamarket known as Gamestop to strongarm publishers into giving them exclusives. They use their over-the-counter sells (you know, when Gamestop gives you a free copy of the rag) to pad their circulation numbers to ungodly highs and then sells that to publishers. Getting you game on the cover of Game Informer is easier than getting a STD from Paris Hilton.
It should be very very wrong when something like Game Informer's November (151) issue has such a blatently camoflauged piece of garbage like they do when advertising (Tom Clancy's Advanced Warfighter I think...). Not only was it in the same format and layout as a standard GI review (albeit with tiny disclaimers at the top of the page) but they placed it right at the beginning of the review section. EGM 195, as one reader submitted in a later Letter to the Editor, has a similar deal, only this time disguised as as a six-page feature article about America's Army - titled "From Combat to Console." What the hell is going on here?
While I too would love to hear which places Shoe has found out for sure house the harder-to-detect, more damaging bribery bullshit, I'd be quite happy just knowing that he stood up, that somebody in the industry gives a damn about ethics when it comes to gaming journalism. Whether or not he seemed to be unecessarily placing a halo over EGM, I'm glad he brought some of this out for the readers at least...
Regardless of the ethical question, and IMHO more importantly than the point Shoe brings up about Games Journalism being unrespected compared to its other reporting peers, one would think that those working at such publications have a love of good games... Giving crappy games better scores, more cover space and deceitful advertisments means MORE crappy games sell, developers see these crappy games selling, and thereby increase production of more half-assed sequels and the like to turn a quick profit... the quality of the titles available to us consumers takes a dive. Especially in the case of the uninformed parent issue, where Mom, Pop or Grandparent wants to get their child a decent game but can't see through bullshit like hidden advertisements and the like, I would think these tactics are a disservice to the industry.
I fully intend to work in this gaming journalism field when I finish my formal education, and if I find myself having to quit from a publication that puts money over ethics and a love of games, here's hoping there'll be a man like Shoe to hire me.
- Sean Hollister
So I just thought someone in sales should enter the mix here. I sell ads in game mags and know for a fact that there are 2 camps out there. Those who sell their edit and those who don't. I work for one who doesn't. There are no shades of gray. There aren't enough dollars out there to change a publishers mind. If you don't sell your edit then you have clear lines of church and state. If you do then it's like a secret rate card between the mag/website and the publisher. The only gray would be Cover Poster and Advertorials. Those are clearly labeled as advertising and should be treated as such - we are running a business! And Cover Posters are never tied to any editorial guarantee. You will never see a cover poster tied to a Cover Story. I have also sold ads for other industries and count myself lucky that I've always worked for magazines which value their integrity over their bank roll. Not to say we aren't in the business of making money. Not to say that having editorial integretity doesn't lead to money. It's simple long term math. Company X spends $1MM a year with a magazine. They threaten to pull ads if they don't get the cover stories, or more favorable reviews - or even just no review at all if their game stinks. Say the magazine plays ball. And word gets out that edit is for sale among other publishers. And more people want to buy. You already started down the slippery slope, so why not. And life is great for a few years. Money comes in and sales has it pretty easy. Then the reader figures things out. Why did this game get the cover? Why did that game get the cover? Why the hell did this game get that score!?! And circulation starts to drop. So shady circ deals are brokered to keep the circ up. People get subscriptions using Frequent Flyer points. Anything to keep their circ up. And that works for a while, but ultimately the poor editorial will kill the reader base. When that happens the $1MM advertiser will stop caring whether or not you cover their game, and forget about advertising with you. Your rates will drop to the floor. You will be forced to sell more edit in order to keep the lights on. Ad your circ will continue to erode. That is why a smart publisher doesn't go down this road. Unfortunately the process for a magazine to feel this impact is long. Very long. Shoe doesn't want to wait for consumers to figure this out on their own. Nor does he want Game journalism as a whole to be labeled as "For Sale". If that happens then we all lose and the pubs which held on to their integrity didn't even get a pay day. GamiDaily Biz said they were going to cover this a while back and never did. If not them, then who? Is CNN really going to cover this story unless someone makes some noise? To whom does the responsibility fall? Honestly, I'm not sure if Shoe was the right person. I am glad that someone said it though.