Related Tags
Latest comments
Latest forum comments
News
Publishers vs. The Media
Posted on Saturday, 6 September 2008 by Speed, source: SoreThumbs
Over at Sore Thumbs is a column written by an unnamed PR guy from a big publisher who talks about how publishers tend to punish game sites for giving bad scores.
On the other hand, our way of working has also brought us on the shitlist of a certain company of which we only get the bare minimum of review titles. And this because we reviewed a PS2 version of a kiddiegame and found it to be utter garbage while most other sites gave "mediocre" scores based on X360 samples. We didn't request a review sample of the game in question and certainly not the PS2 version while it was being promoted on X360, but now we're getting punished for the PR guy's mistake. Guess that's "fair" in the eyes of a publisher, no?
As someone who has worked on the marketing and PR for game publishers for many years, it’s fascinating to read Shoe and Crispin’s perspective on PR for games, and how publishers try to manipulate them to get big previews and good reviews. I have been one of those people, doing everything I can to get try game journalists to place my games on the cover of their magazines, extended previews, assets posted online and the scores as high as possible. I have pulled ad buys in protest of what I felt were unfair review scores. I have spoken to the “boss” of publications before, and complained about certain journalists. I have “banned” certain media outlets from getting pre-release access to games, because of previous unfavorable coverage.
To be fair, though, he does also mention how games are being reviewed badly and he's right on that point as well:What many gamers don’t understand is how busy journalists can be – and also how lazy. Lets say you have a game that takes 30 hours to complete, and reviewer plays 2 hours of it and gives it mediocre review based on the first few levels, just because he has 10 other games to review and can’t put in 20 hours. Or when seeing a game pre-release, the journalist complains about things in the game that are obviously work in progress. Or when an editor of a big games website gives his FPS guy a sim racing game to review. Or when someone looks at all the other reviews online for a game, and just follows the crowd by posting a similar review (look at what’s happening to Too Human right now… does that game deserve scores that bad?). These things happen all the time.
I completely agree with that often you see bad reviews and people following the crowd to please readers. Needless to say we do our best not to do so.On the other hand, our way of working has also brought us on the shitlist of a certain company of which we only get the bare minimum of review titles. And this because we reviewed a PS2 version of a kiddiegame and found it to be utter garbage while most other sites gave "mediocre" scores based on X360 samples. We didn't request a review sample of the game in question and certainly not the PS2 version while it was being promoted on X360, but now we're getting punished for the PR guy's mistake. Guess that's "fair" in the eyes of a publisher, no?
In other news:
1 Comment(s)
NINJAFISH