Game Previews Just Game Marketing?

Kotaku has a feature up today written by James Wagner Au, formerly embedded reporter in the world of Second Life. He's now doing his own thing, and he's got a fairly cynical discussion over at the Kotaku site about the real purpose behind game previews in industry rags. From the article: "For the thing of it is, game magazine previews are almost uniformly positive, even for the most undistinguished titles. So it unrolls thus: publisher makes mediocre game; press previews depict mediocre game as being good or at least worth a look; excited gamers read previews, foolishly believe them, start making pre-sale orders of mediocre game; driven by preview press and pre-sale numbers based on that press, retailers stock up on mediocre game; publisher makes money from mediocre game, keeps making more games like it."

Comments

The Only Good Games Are Free-Software

[Jastiv]

The only good games are free software. That way, if the game is buggy or does not do what you want, you can get the source code to change it until it does what you want. You can also change the graphics and sound files. The whole problem with the game industry, is you do not get the source code with those games and they often do not run on a free operating system. This makes it very difficult to fix the bugs yourself after the game has come out. The other reason games cost so much to make is because they do not share the source code with each other like they should. They are being too competitive to their collective detriment. Here is a good game. http://www.wesnoth.org/