Are game reviewers actually bribed?

[topdog@OC]

Computer publications - bringing you ***** biased reviews of the most mundane overhyped **** since the 80's.

Nothing new there, it's just telling when a title does get a sub-50% score, because it must have really got up the reviewer's nose when playtesting, otherwise fairly meaningless as any kind of bench.

 

[Confused]

Zero Punctuation is the only "reviews" I bother with - Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw is awesome

 

[fendi]

If I go to a review site I'll only read user reviews. Never bother reading the review from someone working for the site/mag.

 

[d_brennen]

Farcry 2 - this single title made me
a) stop paying for gaming magazines
b) stop paying any attention what so ever to game review websites (part from meteoritic with peer reviews).

This was hyped as the best game ever and in reality it was complete garbage. Im not sure if there will be direct payments but i bet there is an element of client entertaining / hospitality

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/far-cry-2/critic-reviews

Makes you wonder, who actually played it before they reviewed it

 

[thezakarum]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/for...anigans-Why-Its-Worse-Than-You-Think#14115006

Thought I'd link an article you guys might find interesting.

 

[weringo]

IGN UK's review of Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 made me lose all faith in any reviews from then on.

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/objects/908/908928.html

It was just about the worst football game of the past decade, no surprise that the game was plastered with IGN advertising.

 

[KatanaDV20]

Farcry 2 - this single title made me
a) stop paying for gaming magazines
b) stop paying any attention what so ever to game review websites (part from meteoritic with peer reviews).

This was hyped as the best game ever and in reality it was complete garbage. Im not sure if there will be direct payments but i bet there is an element of client entertaining / hospitality

+1

I feel robbed with that one. It never deserved to carry the legendary title "Far Cry".

 

[Neil79]

 

[HR4]

Its all about advertising revenue..
Same with gpu’s, bias is everywhere..
.

 

[Xordium]

The only site I bother with these days is RPS and they don't score. I would dearly love an impartial site that would average games 5/10 bad games 1-3/10 and only true masterpieces 10/10 but it's never going to happen.

 

[Mr Krugga]

The only site I bother with these days is RPS and they don't score. I would dearly love an impartial site that would average games 5/10 bad games 1-3/10 and only true masterpieces 10/10 but it's never going to happen.

Aye, it seems like 7/10 is an average score, for some reviewers it's given only for the "passable" games, anything below that is either rubbish from scratch or bug-ridden fest.

The whole system is retarded, something with 3 stars should be ok but it works out at 60% and nobody looks at games like this.

Which is why I judge reviews by the content, not their scores.

 

[Lt_Red]

I would not say its endemic. I used to work for a magazine and we took pride in the fact we told it how it was despite the ads revenue and we never suffered for it. We were never offered a bribe, never asked to up a score and never suffered from advertising pressure. Editorial was wholly separate from ads revenue.

I worked for reviews mags for 5 years and never felt any form of publisher bias from any member of the team despite the jollies, and the reviews went out how they were written. The ads team were left to deal with the throwback it did not once affect editorial content.

That ultimately lead to the fact that publishers releasing sh1te did not advertise in the mag and made for a better experience for the reader. Less ads but more worthwhile ads that actually meant something. Use that thought wisely when visiting websites and reading magazines.

That said, I did once do some freelance work for a well known games mag for a well known rpg on a well known platform and felt obliged to slate it. It got published in all its gory glory but I never got another commission from that particular mag...

 

[Krono5]

It is pretty endemic although you get the odd exceptions. All the big companies like IGN are either crawling up all the big games developers arse's or they're just really bad at the games and sdon't test them properly. Prime examples would be the past 2 or 3 total war games which have all scored rediculously highly while the multiplayer has been a complete joke and the RTS side of the game has been getting progressively worse compared to 5 or 10 years ago when the like of rtw and Med1 were exceptional.

Another exampel would be one of the fallout games I played, perhaps fallout 3. It was the most bug ridden game I've ever experienced and yet it scored 9.6 out of 10.

 

[Tefal]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/sdp2p/are_game_reviewers_actually_bribed/

Makes you wonder when it comes to some titles especially anything related to EA, interesting discussions though...

well yeah, remember the gamespot editor fired for giving a bad review of the terrible kane and lynch game as they were the major site sponsors.

there's an article somewhere from the writers of a now gone magazine about how 73% is the "warning score" high enough to please the publishers marketing guys but low enough to war customers, but that now seems to have crept up to the low 80's.

 

[InKursion]

This one time down on Brighton Pier when I was just starting out as a professional video-game critic, Terry the arcade-owner let me nudge the glass of the penny-shelf games for an entire day, so long as I gave the new Area 51 machine a positive score on Metacritic.

 

[Macro]

Absolutely not!!! Outrageous that anyone should suggest anything like that goes on!

By the way, that was an awesome review of our last title you did, I'm sending over a box of swag for the upcoming AAA release you might find fun. As a trusted, errr, experienced reviewer perhaps you'd like to see some exclusive preview stuff on our next title. It's under NDA so you'd have to come to our HQ in LA, we'd cover travel expenses of course.


*cough*

 

[iamtheoneneo]

not bribed, but definitely the issue with advertising is there as explained pretty well by what happened over on Gamespot many years ago.

IGN for sure are a bunch of scumbags with EG quickly catching them up.

 

[RavenXXX2]

+1 IGN = scum.

 

[GIBURROWS]

You could just come on the Forums here and see what thread in the games section has the most replies(loads of waffle) Skyrim, Football Manager, Starcraft2, BF3 all have loads of replies and I would say all these games would get around 90%

 

[Karma_UK]

If a review website constantly puts out biased reviews people come to realize not to trust them. Then you undermine your existence as a review site and become a game hype site.

My Nintendo fanboi m8 is always saying games are great because they get a high score in the official Nintendo magazine, lolz.

Magazine reviews are so outdated now to an extent so are website reviews.

For me youtube reviews/streams are what I look at now, it's a lot harder to dupe to your audience with that type of media.