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The Contempt of Publishers for Game Reviewers
Newsweek's LevelUp blog is, without a doubt, one of the smartest voices in games writing today. For a great example of that, look no further than N'Gai's recent discussion of 'Gerstmann-gate', which focuses not on the particulars of the incident but what it means in a larger context. "The Gerstmann-C|Net incident, therefore, suggests that having successfully stage-managed the first two parts of the [game coverage] process for years, thanks to the generous spirit in which previews and features have long been written, certain publishers may now be flexing their muscles more forcefully when it comes to the third: reviews. This publisher-editorial tension, as one journalist from an enthusiast outlet informed us, is at its most contentious during the run-up to Christmas, because the pre-holiday period is the time of year when stakes are highest for some companies. That's even more true during this holiday season, which despite the absence of Grand Theft Auto IV will go down as one of the most competitive on record, loaded as it is with AAA hopefuls all seeking their place in the sun." And indeed, perhaps some portions of the games market have 'transcended' these petty squabbles. Certainly EA Casual doesn't care about reviews, and who really needs a game reviewer to tell you whether Brain Age 3 is any good? To revisit the reason this article was written, we turn again to Joystiq, who has been following it closely.
I stopped buying PC Gamer a long time ago. It use to be at least 1/2 inch thick. It used to give honest reviews. I remember some games getting ratings of 42% or something like that. If a game was bad, it got a bad rating. Lately, I haven't seen much reason to buy it. There's much less content then there used to be, more percentage is ads, and the reviews aren't as good as they used to be. PC Gamer has to remember that their main customer is the person buying the magazine. I think they have lost a lot of readers since their early days.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'd like to see a return of demos. Some are starting to do that via demo releases on STEAM and elsewhere, but "back in the day" circa 95-96 it seemed like a majority of "AA" and "AAA" titles had demos, usually distributed via game magazines with demo cds, which in turn made the magazines sell more (easier to buy the magazine than download everything via modem, and often cheaper too considering "pay by the hour" was still a common ISP business model).
I don't think we should go back to demo dvds to sell magazines, but using services like STEAM to make free demos available would be a big improvement over the paid-for "reviews" being pushed by game sites now, and would provide a relativly convenient location to find demos of games you haven't heard of, instead of the current situation of hearing about a game, sorting through all the previews and links to pay-for-download services to eventually find the publisher's download.
While we've had controversy in the past with fake movie reviews, there's never really been a question about bribed movie reviews.
Why is this? I think it's because movie reviews are advertised by the reviewer, not the paper. You don't open up the Chicago Sun-Times to read the Sun-Times movie reviews, you open up the Chicago Sun-Times to read Roger Ebert's movie reviews. For games, however, with the exception of people like Yahtzee and his "Zero Punctuation" reviews, write-ups are advertised by the site as a whole. Read the Gamespot review! Read the IGN review! Compare the Metacritic pages for a film and a game and you'll see what I'm talking about.
So how can we fix this? We need higher-profile game reviewers and for that to occur we need more games to be viewed as art -- or at least as a viable form of expression/story-telling. Just as Hollywood legitimized the movie industry by telling compelling stories and setting up a system of internal rewards for good products (Oscars), we need something legitimate for video-games.
Is that ever going to happen? Who knows.
Of course the whole thing might just be pointless because with demos and such people can get a much better sense of the game than anyone can get with a movie trailer.