Magazines Faking Game Reviews? 247
lunchlady doris writes: "With videogames becoming a huge business and magazines having large lead times, something has got to give if they want to compete with web sites. Planet GameCube has a story where it seems that some magazines have decided that eschewing actual journalism is the way to go, with both Extreme Gamer and Request Magazine having reviews for Nintendo's Eternal Darkness, a game that is currently incomplete and is only expected to arrive in stores at the end of June."
Game Reviews as PR tools (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially, the safe option is to spout whatever Press Release blurb the developers give you right back, translated through a Journalist with maybe 2 hours experience of that game. Just enough to put a personal spin on the Party Line.
If you're an online review site not out to recover printing costs, it's not quite so crucial to your bottom line to pander to the games developers, but for a print mag whose very existence depends on them, the guy who gets the first exclusive sneak peek because the developer likes his mag, shifts more copies of his publication.
So, if the developer says "Hey, want an exclusive sneak peek in return for saying what we want you to say about something you can't really test properly anyway?" most Editors are going to jump up and down singing "Free Content! Gimme Gimme Gimme".
And then theres the guy who writes a review because he's a writer, based on what his mate said about the game, but he's a different story.
Chris.
Its not just games reviews. (Score:2, Insightful)
Its not just games that get reviewed incorrectly, its software too.
Many computer magazines will have glowing reviews of software products that aren't available, aren't complete, or are broken in major ways.
A good current example of this the reviews that many magazines have run recently of Windows XP, these reviews started coming out at the release of the first betas - with little mention of the fact that the final release would be different.
Why the '?' mark? (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd have to be pretty bad with a calendar (and know nothing about games development) to believe that a review written at least six weeks before a game goes gold could be of anything even remotely resembling the finished version. I know for a fact that "Braveheart" was given 95% by one (ahem) reputable UK games rag based on a 10fps demo that crashed every 2 minutes and a promise that the development team was working 20 hour days to get a patch done in time for the boxes hitting the shelves (which was true, but signifies nothing).
Look, picture for a second how this works. A sales weasel turns up from the publisher bearing a package. In the package is a shitty beta version of the game, a promise that it will be fixed (so the magazine won't look like chumps), the advertising material, and a blank cheque. The cheque is ostensibly to pay for the advertising, but the number that goes on it depends on a lot of things. How many eyeballs the magazine is attracting; how understanding the reviewer is going to be about the bugs; how much the reviewer is prepared to just flat out lie; who is buying lunch for who.
The problem is really that the readers put up with it. Specifically, that we reward magazines for running rave review in every issue purely to tempt you to pick them up. Imagine a games mag with the cover page: "All the games reviewed this month suck." Would you buy it? Probably not, but that's exactly the kind of issue you should buy.
You want to know what a game is like? Play a downloadable or cover disk demo, or a friend's copy (local laws allowing, hey ho). Wait until it reaches budget, and see if people are still talking about it. I bought Diablo II + the expansion + Diablo + a strategy guide on Monday, for less than the original cost of Diablo II. Strangely enough, it's still the same game that it was when it first shipped - only without many of the bugs.
Games magazines are an irrelevance now, other than as a means of distributing advertising and cover disks. Online mags are a little better, partly because they don't have print deadlines to hit, but mostly because you can generally read player comments and get a feel for what the title is actually like.
Re:could be worse (Score:2, Insightful)
which we all know is not complete, it is very much beta.
Pah! In my day... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously. The people writing the game articles looked like they were -- like me -- also in thier teens. Unlike me, they had access to press releases, and did a fine job of mangling them.
As an adult, I've been interviewed by reporters and had projects I've worked on reviewed. Nothing makes me wince more then having to read something that is simply wrong -- even if it's a "positive" error. I don't lie, so why should I expect someone else, supposedly objective, to hype or lie for me?
That the articles are still being faked isn't a surprise at all. Ethics and objectivity in popular tech journalism (ZD) is rare, and sometimes missing even at the bottom of the totem pole (Mozillaquest).
Intelligent Gamer, and realities of US publishing (Score:3, Insightful)
We had THE scoop on the Nintendo 64 (then called "Project Reality" or "Ultra 64") -- we were the first site on the entire planet that had mockups and the Editor-In-Chief, Jer Horowitz, created an image that turned out to be EXACTLY what the N64 controller looked like.
Imagine how thrilled I was to see that image ripped off in a pair of print magazines 8 weeks later. Video Games and Computer Entertainment (now defunct) and Electronic Gaming Monthly both lifted the image and claimed it as their own. I was irate, and made some phone calls.
The publisher of EGM, Sendai Media Group (aka Sendai New Media) purchased us 6 weeks later. It was, without a doubt, the worst business decision of my life. =) Not only were we vastly underpaid (they bought Gamespot 3 months later for $10 million -- we were not paid in the millions -- or even in the hundred-thousands) but our entire culture was ripped apart.
We took advertising. Yep, people were paying for online advertising in 1994. And not $0.000003 CPM! We never let that advertising money affect our journalistic integrity. We were rock-solid. Anything that was a review was labeled as a review and we told people what state the game was in when we reviewed it.
We had news and rumors too. Guess what? All rumors had a bright green label saying "RUMOR." Hey, we got some of those wrong too -- but at least you knew that could happen going in.
Sendai was bought by Ziff-Davis. They killed the magazine in 9 months. We had 250,000 paid subscribers but everyone started hating the magazine when we became a "me too" clone. In order to be first in print we were forced to play fast and loose -- and never write anything bad about anyone spending money with us.
HARRY POTTER FIRST LOOK INSIDE!!!!!
How many magazines had that just to get a bigger buy rate? More than a few. How many of them really reviewed that dog of a game? Not too many.
Sigh. The reality of the situation is that money drives the magazine business. Very few magazines -- and none in the US -- actually cover the video game/PC software business as real journalists. They are ALL hoars to the software publishers. All of them.
Re:Happens all the time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Magazines don't get "special" copies. They get "Gold" code versions, they just aren't retail pressed copies. Most publishers have strict rules about magazines publishing "reviews" of anything other than a specifically reviewable version of the game.
Second, in this case, the clownboat is claiming to have been allowed to play the game by Nintendo. I know for a FACT that NO ONE outside of Nintendo has seen a build more recent than the E3/Cube Club version.
Third, Silicon Knights mocked up a lot of areas and removed anything pertaining to the actual plot in an effort to keep it secret. What he "reviewed" was nothing more than a technical demo.
Lastly, it's more the magazine's insistence that this reviewer wouldn't lie about having played the final game, so he much have reviewed it fairly. That's ignorant. Reviewers fake shit all the fucking time. To claim that YOUR reviewer wouldn't lie is ridiculous.
I suppose the only solace we can take is that "Replay Magazine" is more of a newsletter than a REAL magazine.
Game Reviews are all skewed (Score:2, Insightful)