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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.
I will take that one step further. I am a video game addict, but I cannot for the life of remember the last time I bought a video game magazine of ANY sort.
You can get the cheats online.
You can get the walkthroughs online.
You can get the reviews online (from other users, not editors/writers who are in the game publisher's pocket-- try amazon.com, epinions.com?)
And if that isn't enough, go to best buy / target / walmart and try playing the game in the store, if you can find a playable demo.
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
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.
That why one must suspect any newsource that makes most of its money by selling adds rather than subscriptions.
Oh wait...
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.
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.