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

color me ...

[McGiraf]

... surprised

Gotta listen to him

[black6host]

I'm telling you, everything this guy says is gold. :)

Re:color me ... Shocked

[ePhil_One]

Really, I think this guy may be on to something. Lately, I've been thinking hardware companies don't send review sites expensive computers for free out of the goodness of theri heart, I think they are doing it for Marketing reasons. This could blow the whole industry out of the water!