HardOCP

[ALXAndy]

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth". God help us. Hang on, wait a minute...

Oh it was comedy gold you should have been there.

Lines such as...

"Now now lads, that's enough. Now stop it or I will send you on a holiday".

His moderator willy must have grown ten times in size that night.

 

[james.miller]

Ocuk have nothing to gain from bias against a brand and as Andy says it wouldn't be a very good idea.

Any yet it happens. Every staff review here gives a product nothing but an excellent score, and every member of staff/the admin team will appear to add their own comments on how amazing said product is. You'd have to be blind to think OCUK aren't biased towards the products they are selling at the time. That's retail, surely, and it's not as different to independent biased reviewers as people would like to believe.

Case in point, i remember a thread about a year ago promoting an android tablet that OCUK had on offer at the time. it was outdated then and people rightly pointed out what a bad deal it really was - the thread disappeared rather abruptly....

 

[Mysterae_]

TTL is great, awesome videos. Linus is great to!!

+1

 

[ALXAndy]

Any yet it happens. Ever staff review here gives a product nothing but an excellent score, and every member of staff/the admin team will appear to add their own comments on how amazing said product is. You'd have to be blind to think OCUK aren't biased towards the products they are selling at the time. That's retail, surely, and it's not as different to independent biased reviewers as people would like to believe.

Case in point, i remember a thread about a year ago promoting an android tablet that OCUK had on offer at the time. it was outdated that and people rightly pointed it it - thread disappeared....

That's just a simple marketing strategy. Big up what you want sold, it will sell.

Doesn't take rocket science to work out what they are doing, and it only works on people like Bhavv who will believe everything they read.

A good product at a good price does not need selling, it merely needs pointing out to show its existence.

You must remember at all times that OCUK is an operating business. Hence the non allowance of posting competitor links. They will always have their best interests at heart, and those interests are making money.

Hence what we have been talking about in this thread. Reviewers are no such thing, they are salesmen for the most part being paid to do a job. And that job for the most part does not care for being honest, merely bigging up a product so it can be sold.

Do you think when say, Zotac send a card to be reviewed and pay the reviewer for his review and tests that they expect anything less than "Wow super awesome great product check out the benchmarks wow it's so much faster than the card we haven't been paid to review today !".

So, once again I will point it out, mostly for people like Bhavv who don't yet know how the world works.

Being a reviewer is a paid job. ****ging off the product you have been paid to review usually ends up with you not getting any work.

See also - Stuart Campbell. If you know who he is you will know why he's had no work as a game journo for about five years.

 

[james.miller]

That's just a simple marketing strategy. Big up what you want sold, it will sell.

Like I said, its retail. But the basics principals are the same - inaccurate reviews promoting a product ahead of other products in the same field. Read some of the reviews and you'll understand what i mean. Whether it's an independent pushing a product because of 'sponsorship', or a retailer pushing a product because of profit margins - it's all the same.

 

[ALXAndy]

Like I said, its retail. But the basics principals are the same - inaccurate review promoting a product ahead of other products in the same field. Read some of the reviews and you'll understand it.

Such is life sadly. Pointing out the good bits about a product to make it sell is what has been happening since the dawn of time.

The amount of rubbish on the box of my XFX 7970 said it all. They renamed all of the things AMD put on the card to make it sound like you were getting something extra. "Ghost PCB". Eh? I've still to this day to work out what the heck that was all about. Total curry pumps being emitted there.

Bottom line was my card was simply a stock AMD card they put their sticker on. Nothing more, nothing less.

Only review site I have seen to this day who brought up the lack of vram on a 680 was Vortez, and fair play for that.

 

[Helios1234]

Tom had a custom motherboard made. RIIIE IIRC. He had it customised so that it was all blue and black and had the ram slots changed. Cost a pretty penny.

Any way, he leant it to the ginge and he blew it up.

Plus he allowed the ginge to moderate the forum and the ginge immediately started going around threatening to ban people. Good few members quit over it.

I don't think he paid for it. I was there when he requested it off ASUS. Didn't see the point as red and black is so much nicer on the R3E.

 

[ALXAndy]

I don't think he paid for it. I was there when he requested it off ASUS. Didn't see the point as red and black is so much nicer on the R3E.

Tom can't be happy with what every one else has.

And he got the ram banks done locally IIRC and paid for it.

But yeah, I agree. It looked totally boring at the end.

 

[Helios1234]

Do you think when say, Zotac send a card to be reviewed and pay the reviewer for his review and tests that they expect anything less than "Wow super awesome great product check out the benchmarks wow it's so much faster than the card we haven't been paid to review today !".

So, once again I will point it out, mostly for people like Bhavv who don't yet know how the world works.

Being a reviewer is a paid job. ****ging off the product you have been paid to review usually ends up with you not getting any work.

Actually, we don't get paid anything. At least I didn't... you simply get sent stuff and review. If the product is good, then no one loses. However if the product is bad, there are several things that can happen. The way I'd go about it is point out the things that are wrong and fail and advise the manufacturers how to improve them. If they don't do anything about it, then I won't recommend them and will make my point clear on forums like this one. If they take feedback into consideration and improve the product, then I'd update the review after retesting to see if the changes were good. This way, the manufacturers will hopefully listen to you and not blacklist you. After all, it's our job to be honest. The way other people go about it is that they simply criticise the products without any constructive criticism and they end up losing partners. So in the end, those reviewers end up going back to those partners and beg them for new samples whereby they decide to rave about them to get into their good books again. That's something I've noticed with a few other reviewers anyway...

Personally, if I rated something to be bad, it's the manufacturer's choice if they want to work with me or not, as I have nothing to lose whereas they do. Plus we all have to realise that if one of their products are bad doesn't necessarily mean everything else is, so it shouldn't be in their nature to blacklist you for a negative review and it shouldn't be in the reviewer's nature to criticise a manufacturer on one product alone.

So yeah, technically we aren't salespeople, we simply share our thoughts on products and if they're good, we recommend them. But then I can't speak for other sites who have been known to be quite dubious in the past. Also, money is generated through advertising and that doesn't necessarily mean that they pay the review site to glorify them, it's just so that they get some exposure on new products.

 

[Mysterae_]

See also - Stuart Campbell. If you know who he is you will know why he's had no work as a game journo for about five years.

Thanks for that, I had no idea who he was so googled and found this.

Quite interesting but he blames something other than himself.

I hope it will all come round full circle, when the readership takes control, fed up with the constant barrage of advertising and shills. Advertising will become hot property once again, enough to sustain a site and companies will beg for their kit/game to be reviewed (and not pay for a review). For this to happen though, we the public will have to pay for it, and it'll be through subscription or in app purchases. If we pay for it we will demand honesty, integrity, unbias and value for money. It's why I haven't bought a newspaper since 1988.

With the onset of tablet devices, I can see the future of people hogging the family tablet and reading it while having a dump.

Eeeww.

 

[ALXAndy]

So yeah, technically we aren't salespeople, we simply share our thoughts on products and if they're good, we recommend them. But then I can't speak for other sites who have been known to be quite dubious in the past. Also, money is generated through advertising and that doesn't necessarily mean that they pay the review site to glorify them, it's just so that they get some exposure on new products.

Technically no, you aren't sales people. However, as you say, adverts are what brings in the cash. What better advert than one that has a gold OC3D award slapped all over it?

Sales people or not though you can not bite the hands that feed as they will simply go to some one who can get excited and bend the truth.

And that's why Tom has done well. He's a good actor.

 

[bfar]

I don't think there's any hard evidence to say that HardOCP is biased, but there'll always be a little 'reviewer opinion' in every publication; some more, some less. That's journalism for ya.

They're worth a look; I don't find their 'apples to apples' method particularly useful, but others will. Its just one publication of many, so its really up to you to decide which ones you trust. There's no internet police that will do that for you. I look at all the reviews I can find for an expensive product like graphics card. In my time I've even seen the better sites write poor reviews occasionally, albeit rarely. Overall, my personal fave is the Tech Report - good reviews and articles, and a great daily roundup of news from other sites.

 

[Gregster]

I have a subscription to PC Format and you always see biased towards products. It might not be intentional but reviewers will still have a preference to a product.

 

[ALXAndy]

Thanks for that, I had no idea who he was so googled and found this.

Quite interesting but he blames something other than himself.

Back in the day we lauded reviewers for being brutal. We loved finding out what was a good game and what was a bad one. We also loved to see the "dog poo" or "Man sitting on toilet" award that certain magazines used to have being put on bad games.

Back then there basically were bad games.

Now? They're all good. They all score at least 7 and have appeal for some one sitting out there. So has game quality increased? or are there just as many rubbish ones around as there once were?

It's quite clearly the latter. The only difference is they are now corporate entities so all it takes is paying some one to say it's good and you have a few million people fooled into handing over their money. Of course, we all know how it is impossible to take back a bad game and say "Excuse me. This game is actually pants so I would actually like my actual money back please !"

What do we get met with?

"Oh sorry ! you have opened it. Therefore you must be satisfied with it because due to a loophole in the law you are not allowed to return a game that is jerky or stutters or plain and simply does not work properly !".

Stuart knows that only too well. Infact, he was met with cease and desist from Atari when he released his review of Driv3r. He rightly pointed out that it was a broken buggy mess that should not qualify to be called a game.

 

[Helios1234]

Technically no, you aren't sales people. However, as you say, adverts are what brings in the cash. What better advert than one that has a gold OC3D award slapped all over it?

Sales people or not though you can not bite the hands that feed as they will simply go to some one who can get excited and bend the truth.

And that's why Tom has done well. He's a good actor.

Yeah, well that's why some sites are popular and others not so much. Some sites just try to be controversial to get views and it works despite the review being completely idiotic.

It's difficult to argue about the awards and things because to most it seems that reviewers are dependent on manufacturers and as such must be paid somehow by them. But perhaps I was in a unique situation because I never got paid for anything despite constantly "selling" someone's product via the forum. But then, would it be considered selling a product if I constantly recommended the same cooler but wasn't actually getting anything back for doing so? The manufacturer's certainly don't care because all they want is an award. So where would you draw the line between simply recommending something and "selling" a product? Putting an award on a product isn't a bad thing as marketing, but you have to trust the site that handed the award.

It's difficult to understand how reviewing works and even I don't fully understand it. Ideally, it's someone with experience with certain products being able to give you an unbiased overview of a product with money playing no part in it whatsoever and also being able to give feedback to manufacturers. However, in reality there's a lot of politics involved. Manufacturers often just want an award at the end so they don't actually care what you write about or what you have to say about their product. As a result, you get sites that write a two page review with the specs, 2 results and a couple of pics being promoted by the manufacturers because they get good awards at the end. And then you get manufacturers who simply want their product on a site that gets lots of view. Understandable, but that doesn't mean the review itself is any good/useful to people wanting to find out about the product. There's a lot of gray areas for sure and I can see why some people might think that reviews aren't reliable because a lot of people do have agendas.

But at the end of the day, they're the only people who have access to a range of components and can at least compare them. As much as people argue that user reviews are more reliable, they simply aren't because of the 100s of variables that come into play when using different systems. You just have to find sites that's trustworthy and won't bring their own agenda into it. I wouldn't say Vortez was perfect either (if anyone thinks I'm being biased) but I try to be as accurate as possible because I'm no different to the people reading the reviews and I know how skeptical people can be. And most importantly, I know what readers want to see.

Sites that I find to be trustworthy include Anandtech, Techreport, TPU and maybe a couple of others.

 

[RavenXXX2]

Anandtech, Techpowerup and hexus are the best sites imo.

 

[Mysterae_]

Stuart knows that only too well. Infact, he was met with cease and desist from Atari when he released his review of Driv3r. He rightly pointed out that it was a broken buggy mess that should not qualify to be called a game.

I actually enjoyed Driv3r very much, completed it in fact, but I didn't get it right away so avoided the bugs. My distrust in review sites grew a little again after Bit-Tech, a site I highly regarded, reviewed the Anno 2070 demo and poo poo'd it. You could tell the reviewer couldn't be arsed with it, the type of game was not his forte. He should probably have gone and killed a zombie or thrown an angry bird in to space.

Anyway, Anno 2070 was on sale on Steam and the Bit-Tech review put me off it. I was after a change in pace after CoDMW, BF3, Fear 3, Stalker CS, (you see the pattern here). After watching some (sweary but entertaining) reviews of Anno 2070 on youtube I thought I'd give it a try and was hooked. What I'm trying to get at and I'm sure you are aware, is the amount of bias in reviews and inappropriate reviewers. It's arguably as harmful to the industry as a high marked review of a **** game.

 

[ALXAndy]

I actually enjoyed Driv3r very much, completed it in fact, but I didn't get it right away so avoided the bugs. My distrust in review sites grew a little again after Bit-Tech, a site I highly regarded, reviewed the Anno 2070 demo and poo poo'd it. You could tell the reviewer couldn't be arsed with it, the type of game was not his forte. He should probably have gone and killed a zombie or thrown an angry bird in to space.

Anyway, Anno 2070 was on sale on Steam and the Bit-Tech review put me off it. I was after a change in pace after CoDMW, BF3, Fear 3, Stalker CS, (you see the pattern here). After watching some (sweary but entertaining) reviews of Anno 2070 on youtube I thought I'd give it a try and was hooked. What I'm trying to get at and I'm sure you are aware, is the amount of bias in reviews and inappropriate reviewers. It's arguably as harmful to the industry as a high marked review of a **** game.

You can usually pick up the enthusiasm or non enthusiasm for the game/product at hand immediately.

That is what happens when you throw a product or game on the desk of some one who has no interest in it.

They are then forced to write about it as they are being paid to do so, and it's not ideal.

Subjective reviewing is very hard to do. Especially for those passionate about what they are doing. Like something too much and the alarm bells go off.

It's immensely difficult to remain neutral during a review, especially if you like what you are reviewing.

 

[Gerard]

Anandtech, Techpowerup and hexus are the best sites imo.

Or realistically back in the day any site that gave nvidia the nod, even if it was hardocp

 

[Helios1234]

It's immensely difficult to remain neutral during a review, especially if you like what you are reviewing.

But one could argue that you like it because it's good.