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.

Comments

Was there ever any doubt?

[Rowan_u]

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.

Funny..

[Grave]

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.

from TFA

[jbellis]

"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

A good example is www.gun-tests.com

[marcus]

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".

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 /. 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.