Magazines Faking Game Reviews?

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."

Not very unusual

[bjelkeman]

I know someone who used to work for a film review magazine in London who said that the last year she worked there they hardly went to see any films at all. They were so understaffed that they didn't have time to see the films and wrote reviews of them without seeing them.

She got fed up and left. I think you will find this practise is not as unusual as one would hope.

I've seen this for years.

[Blaede]

My particular addiction is NASCAR simulations. I used to love reading reviews raving about certain tracks and features being in the game, when in reality they weren't. When they touted great coding features that in reality were the opposite and serious gameplay bugs, that really cracked me up. Any player of those games would immediately have know the reviewer hadn't even bothered installing to game. As of now, I couldn't care less about magazine reviews. The critical (and sometimes overtly negative) observations made by posted in those game's forums help me out better in making my purchases. Fake journalism? Nothing new, kinda reminds me of the fake citations I had to make up for a college paper (although in this case I truly made my own observations and analysis throughout the paper, but yet the instuctor insisted on me citing people, so I "did").

Try EBs list for fake "top selling" charts.

[Blaede]

I forgot to add this in as an example of other types of fakery. NASCAR Racing 2002 Season came out this Wednesday. But if you checked EB's top selling charts last week, you would have seen this game listed at #4 among the top sellers. Huh?

Merely the influence of the big corporates

[phil_atk]

This is nothing new, although this is a topical subject at the moment - corporate influence on everyday life.

There are numerous examples of bias within the games reviewing industry. It is common knowledge that some magazine publishers have a higher standing with certain games publishers *cough* M$ *cough* - it's the way the system works.

By giving favourable reviews, the magazines get more inside scoops, get the review bundles earlier and make more on circulation numbers.

I guess many of you are questioning why the magazines aren't just favourable to all publishers, but the answer would be that they need to maintain a modicum of journalistic integrity to 'sell' reviews in the first place.

It's all part of the machine!

Magazine reviews + pinch of salt

[Scorchio]

It seems difficult to get true unbiased reviews of games these days. After all, it's in the interest of the magazine publisher to keep a good relationship with the game developer, because a) they want to sell advertising space to these people and b) they want to be invited back to see the next games. I've been in games development for several years now and I've seen reviews vary from 20% to 90%, depending on whether the journalist was taken to lunch or not. Also, in the rush to be first to cover a new game, they can create a preview with the skimpiest of factual information on the game design. That's always fun when the end result has varied considerably from the initial design.

The fault is probably equally shared between games developers and the magazines that (p)review their games. I just try to remember to these facts while reading reviews, and bear in mind that those lovely screenshots have probably been carefully selected and touched up by artists on the project. Who knows, you might really enjoy a game marked as mediocre by the reviewer because it's something that he or she personally doesn't like all that much. Best to wait and read the comments from people who have bought and played the game, on the forums and newsgroups out there.

A clear case of "one hand washes the other"

[philipx]

I have a friend who while working for a Games magazine was assigned to review an upcoming game. The game was planned to be released no sooner than two months.
So she got a copy of the "close circuit game preview" CD and thought to give it a fair ride.
It took 3 days to install the game - it was so poorly written it only worked on a single test machine and it was UGLY and slow like hell.
So acting in consequence, my friend wrote the review and give it a 3 out of 10 :).
Suprise, surprise ! The editor was pissed and started to yell something along the lines of "yo' tryin' to ruin us or what ?!".
It turned out it was (guess still is) common practice to write good reviews in order to get early previews. You see, the magazine sells because it features early reviews, hence it has to get early game releases and has to write GOOD reviews in order for early stuff to keep coming and readers keep buying.
OTOH, the game companies obviously need to have good publicity so they use (among other stuff like PR and paid trips to nice resorts in order for editors to get a "preview" of the new stuff) this mechanism of early reviews.
Needless to say the game ended up as a complete failure, but all things considered who remembers the article that gave the game 8.8 out of 10 ? :)
Who said politics is the only whore ?

This has long been the case

[rcs1000]

In the UK, the magazine Edge (http://www.edge-online.com) has a column called Red Eye by a veteran video game journalist.

About six months ago the column was about a journalist who boasted of writing a review of a game without even playing it. According to Red Eye, the practise is remarkably common - as magazines and web sites fight to make sure they aren't caught out by scoops from others.

Red Eye also criticises video game journalists from acting like a pack. He cites Driver 2 as an example where the universally positive reviews ignored significant flaws in the game.

Anyway, just my thoughts,

*r

Please ... Not GamesDomain ...

[great throwdini]

I always read GamesDomain [gamesdomain.com] for online PC game reviews. They always seemed much more uppity about things. Although lag was sometimes a bit painful for certain key reviews, it contributed to my impression that the reviewers actually played the games in question. I have to know, though, were they just taking their time, or was the lag some by-product of its (British?) origin? Or did they skate by like other reviewers, using the free time to pursue less noble goals?

Go ahead. Burst my bubble. I stopped reading the site compulsively after the last round of layout changes and site reorganization (more ads, less intelligent design). I just want to know the truth.

I can handle it. Honest.

This what exactly what put me off buying pc mags

[modipodio]

I used to spend money on mags like pc gamer and pc zone , but I got pissed off at both the tone and content of there review's and found that on the whole better and more up to date reviews with in depth commentary from gamers and a wider scope of opinions could be found online .I now do not see the point of spending money on pc gaming magazines who constantly have to do a balancing act bettween advertisers and there reader base which often leads to comprimise's in the quality of a review .

independant reviews

[nukey56]

As long as I can remember, I have always hated the journalistic hogwash that gets thrown into places like PC Magazine, Windows Magazine, etc. Half their articles are just buzzwords and their own interpretation of them. I'm sure there are "review lobbyists" of some sort from software publishers that push for softer reviews of their products. As an effect of this, I would guess that more products are rated highly than those graded harshly, even though a large amount of software out there is utter crap (especially closed-source commercial stuff).

Personally, I enjoy reviews from actual gamers, like the horde at shacknews. Seeing multiple opinions of a game helps put it into perspective, taking the subjecticism out. However, these types of reviews usually don't come out until after the game is released, so the first wave of gamers are usually influenced by the larger, lobbied reviewers.

I guess what im trying to say here is that waiting a little while for a game to be released and tested by the masses might be worth popping $50 for something that isn't what you expected it to be *Cough*daikatana*cough.

Re:Why the '?' mark?

[JohnBE]

I do have to wonder what percentage of games are not reviewed but based on superficial reasoning. I've worked places that basically re-work the press-releases they are sent and then add to that any further lobbying. Generally when a company is onto a winner (and they know it) they'll lobby extra hard, lots of 'big lunches' and visits from PR folk with free T-Shirts etc.

I like your term 'sales weasel' although this is a bit sexist for female weasels who should be called a bitch, doe or jill. So sales weasel should become:

Sales weasel/jill
Sales weasel/bitch
Sales weasel/doe

I like 'sales bitch' best. ;-). Or is that offensive to weasels?

Re:Not very unusual -reminds me of Manchette (RIP)

[dario_moreno]

The quite famous (at the time) french writer
JP Manchette got away with this for three years or
more ! He wrote film critics for "Charlie Hebdo"
from a remote mountain commune, based on what
his 12 years old son would say to him on the phone, and critics from daily newspapers. So he was the only french intellectual to (rightly) praise "Indiana Jones I" or "1941" !
The critics were actually so good that they were
recently released as a book.

I think he did it as a mixture of situationnism and despise for the readers, whom he may have considered of the same mental age as his son.

He ended the game when the journal went bankrupt
by announcing a sneak preview of a Georgian stalinist movie of the late 40's, without
subtitles, in a remote suburb of Paris, staged at 11:30 PM (so everyone would miss the last subway). Pitch : love story between a sovkhoze farm worker anda tractor repairer. Indeed, he just
wanted to make fun of snob, left-wing
pseudo-intellectuals. He then revealed that
he had cheated on all of his movie reviews.

Maybe this stuff with videogames is related : journalist just exploting the sheepy attitude
of teenagers (or not grown ups 20-30 yo),
only wanting to impress their friends with
their knowledge of the newest games.

Re:Seen it at both IGN and Gamespot, too.

[bungo]

I understand the most probable reasons: lack of time

You meant to say 'lack of integrity', didn't you?

Confusing 'time' with 'integrity' is something that happens quite often to over generous slashdot posters, as well as corrupt hacks which can be bought by as little as saving an hour by using a press release as their review.

I wonder if that would work for my MSc thesis? .... "of course professor, I didn't really have time to do all of the work myself, but I found a press release telling me it was true....."

Re:Try EBs list for fake "top selling" charts.

[bzcpcfj]

I can think of a couple of reasons for this. Assuming EB uses the same methods for computing "top selling" games as Billboard Magazine did for computing the top recordings back when I followed that mag, they could well rate something very high that's not released or just released.

First, they may be counting pre-orders. N2002 has been available for pre-order for at least a month. Second, they may factor in opinion data from retailers. A retailer gets a lot of people coming in asking if they have N2002, so he gives it a high rating even though he hasn't sold copy one.

I can remember records being listed as million-sellers the day they were released, all based on retailer pre-orders.

Of course, the fact that I remember "records" as an example proves that (a) there's nothing new under the sun, and (b) I've been around since just after the sun was formed...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Magazines Faking Game Reviews?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh that's nothing, business software reviews are at least as bad, especially if you consider that users jobs are at stake. I was the chief architect for a small (tiny is more like it) software company. We had a rather large and complex corporate message management package that we sent to a reviewer at a large mainstream PC magazine. One of the "features" of the package was the need for a license key specific to the customer that we would have to generate. Well we never heard from the reviewer, but a couple of months later our product showed up as in a comparison review of corporate message management software. We got top scores for a lot of features including "ease of use" and "ease of installation". The ease of installation was particularly funny since they had never been sent a software key and had obviously made the whole thing up. They even had a screenshot from a previous beta version that was part of a press release from a year before. I suspect the whole review was made up. This didn't stop the insane president of the company from ordering up a bunch of reprints of the review, and he kept asking why the new version of the software wasn't as easy to use as the version that we sent to the reviewer.

I'm feeling a bit cowardly and will post this anonymously to protect the guilty.

Full review after 3 hours of playing

[fuxoft]

I used to work for games magazine and it was quite usual for full review to be done based on different platform (e.g. N64 review based on playing PC version of the game), reviewing from pirated (Warez) CDs, reviewers being told in advance how many stars they should give to the game and reviewers going abroad to visit the developers, playing the unfinished game there for 2-3 hours, then coming back and writing their "full review" based on that. As far as I remember, this didn't seem weird to anyone involved...

Happens everywhere

[JimPooley]

In the case of computer magazines, they're trying to get the FIRST REVIEW!!! (a bit like First Post!) which will sell more copies of the magazine.

But sloppy work happens everywhere. David (Hutch) Soul recently successfully sued [guardian.co.uk] the one time showbusiness columnist of the "Daily Mirror" (crappy UK tabloid) over a review of a play Soul starred in.
The review said at the Monday performance, only 45 people turned up and the audience laughed derisively at Soul. They didn't do Monday performances...!

Re:Happens all the time...

[hgiddens]

I doubt this will catch anyone who was conversant with the Amiga gaming magazine scene circa May 1995.

For those who don't know, in this period, Amiga Action not only reviewed a (blatantly) PC version of an unreleased (at that point) Amiga game to gain an exclusive over other magazines (Subwar 2050), but reviewed a game that was never actually released for the Amiga, because it was unfinished (Pizza Tycoon). Needless to say that they reviewed many other unfinished games, along with many other mags.

Amiga Power was, AFAIK, about the only magazine that didn't review unfinished software (mostly...) or blatantly plagarise other magazines (AUI). Once they did review an unfinished game - namely, SWOS '95 - and were so severly bitchslapped by the readership the didn't do it again.

As far as I'm concerned, the moral of the story is that anything you read in a print computer games magazine is not to believed due to the competition with online mags (i.e PC Gamer (IIRC) and Ghost Recon)

Semi-related

[Flynnhustler]

Some believe that a game shouldn't be reviewed until the writer completes the game.

The sad fact is that many game reviewers don't have the time [robotstreetgang.com] to play every game to it's conclusion before drafting their review.

Perhaps now, gamers will be satisfied with journalists that care enough to actually play the game.
-g

Real gear. Real world. Real reviews.

[securitas]

This problem of fictional reviews is the main reason we started Geartest.com [geartest.com]. The problem doesn't only exist with video games but with most consumer technology products. Most tech 'reviews' out there are nothing more than regurgitated press releases with 'reviewer' doing nothing more than spending a few hours of playing around with one product or another.

That's in stark contrast to our review philosophy: Real gear. Real world. Real reviews. We don't write reviews about products based on press releases or in a pre-release stage. We use the products for an extended period in real conditions. And we tell the people what we found, with updates as warranted. That means if it's good we'll say so, and if it sucks we'll say that too... but usually the truth is somewhere in between.

We have had difficulty in getting manufacturers to send products to us for review. That is despite having grown to the point where we consistently have 5-figure impression levels, projecting breaking the 100,000 impression level soon. All of that is without us doing any advertising. Pure word-of-mouth. It's no Slashdot but we think it's decent traffic.

We suspect that the biggest problem (from the point of view of manufacturers) is that they simply don't want to risk getting a negative review. We believe it's in a manufacturer's interest to receive unbiased, journalistically sound reviews of its products. Ultimately that can enhance their credibility and add value to a brand in the eyes of the product-buying public.

We have had some people suggest to us that we 'play ball' if we want their cooperation. Frankly, it's not going to happen. We may miss out on getting 'insider' opportunities to cover and review items -- and we may not get to review some items that our users have asked us to -- but the feedback and response we have received from our readership (a good mix of techies and laypeople) tells us that we are on the right track.

The way we see it is this: if you have confidence in your product, then you should have no problem putting it to an unbiased test. It's surprising how many product managers recoil and refuse when you put it to them so plainly.

We're in the process of designing our 3rd-iteration site to enhance user-friendliness and add some more features and functionality. The one thing that will stay constant is that we won't trade our integrity for 'A-list' access to products. If that means we don't get access, we'll just deal with the people and companies who see the value in what we're doing.

Check out Geartest.com [geartest.com] and let us know what you think.

Outpost, anybody?

[frobozz3.141]

Anybody remember Outpost, Sierra Online's foray into the non-adventure game market a couple of years back? It was the most bug-ridden game since, oh, maybe Daggerfall (which turned out to be a GREAT game, go figure), and probably held that title until last year's Pool of Radiance shipped. Anyway, bug-infested, features listed in the manual but not in the actual game (and vice versa), a clumsy interface, the list goes on and on.

PC Gamer gave it a 93% review in their
September 1994 issue. [pcgameworld.com] PC Gamer then proceeded to spend the next half decade apologizing for the rating, even in their review of Outpost 2 [pcgameworld.com].

The moral of the story? People can get away with pretty much saying whatever they please, as long as it serves SOMEBODY.

-Frobozz