It's been probably 10 years or so since I was writing reviews, and I have to say, I never felt pressure to skew a review one way or another.

The biggest heat I got was from fanboys when I had a sneak peek at PAX of Duke Nukem Forever and had to report how shitty it was. "YOU DON'T KNOW!!! YOU DIDN'T PLAY THE WHOLE GAME!!! YOU HACK!!!"

And I was like "Yeah, you're right, I didn't play the whole game, I played what their marketing team WANTED me to play and it sucked, you think the parts they DIDN'T want me to play are going to be better?"

Surprise... the game stunk up the joint.

But when it came to reviewing games, I approached every review as if the game were a 10/10, and then as I played I looked for reasons to subtract or add points. The plusses and minuses would balance out and I'd have a final score.

As a former teacher, I used school grades, which is why I think most sites are on a 7-10 scale.

A - 90%+
B - 80%+
C - 70%+
D - 60%+
F - 59% and down.

A game can be bad because it's a bad game or it can be bad because it's functionally broken. D is generally the Ralph Wiggum of games, possible to like, but you have to admit it's pretty bad.

I had to give a failing review to Assassin's Creed Liberty on the Playstation Vita even though I really liked how it looked and it played, because it had a game breaking bug that made your save file unloadable. Ubi took 2 months to fix it, rendering it unplayable for the first two months after launch.

Once it was fixed, I amended the review, but it was plainly unacceptable to release it in a broken state like that.

"Decay"

What's left to decay? It's dust now. Remember when Eidos used a PR firm to strongarm websites into not publishing reviews of Tomb Raider: Underworld if they were less than an 8/10 till after launch?

"That's right. We're trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos." When asked why, the spokesperson said: "Just that we're trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that's handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don't put people off buying the game, basically."

That was 15 years ago, and despite the fact that Barrington Harvey went on to lie and pretend they never said that, everybody knew that kind of thing was old hat back then too. Mainstream gaming journalism is a captured industry.

big published reviews don't mean anything to me and I'm surprised they do to most people. everything is an 8-10 out of 10. how do people not find an issue with that

Stuff like this is why I never buy new games. Not only can you not trust the critics, but players get so blinded by hype and buyers remorse that they’ll ignore everything bad about the games they love.

It’s always wiser to wait for the hype to die down and see what the retrospective consensus is

Apparently Jeff Gerstmann received the review code quite a bit later than other publications. He said it's quite a ridiculous story that perhaps he would talk about it someday (his tone sounds like this is a story in the far future)

Jeff is ex (old) Gamespot, ex Giantbomb, and the guy who got fired from Gamespot due to external pressure from Eidos after he gave Kane and Lynch a 6 out of 10.

Its more like the problem of Neo-liberalism and hyper capitalism at this point.....

Journalism dying is just a by-product.

Is there any reason to follow game journalism outlets anymore? Reading some positive/negative Steam reviews and watching some gameplay footage on its own gives a really good impression of what a game is like IMO.

Ratings. Are. Stupid.

When it comes to movies and audience scores, sure, look at the rotten tomatoes score or whatever. But everyone should realize that the average score of EVERY CRITIC is just going to be a useless number.

Not only that but reviewers who represent entire companies like the people at IGN and elsewhere aren’t giving an honest opinion. I know this because a few of them have given their honest opinion before. They got fired for low scores.

This is the reason that I enjoy watching reviews from people like ACG or SkillUp. They don’t need to give a score because their opinion isn’t a number. Enjoyability isn’t a number. Both of those reviewers enjoy games slightly different than I do, but when I watch their reviews I get a sense of if I will enjoy them.

Seriously if you go to outlets who give scores on games commonly, stop. Very little time is put into choosing these numbers and they reflect nothing about enjoying a game for you personally. Go watch a review from ACG or SkillUp. Outlets like IGN or PCGamer can’t hold a candle to these guys.

I don't understand the purpose of big company reviewers (for subjective stuff like media at least). If I'm watching a smaller reviewer my goal is figure out their tastes so I can ignore the criticisms that I know don't bother me, and pay very close attention to where their tastes align with mine. Like if dunky calls a game buggy or slow paced, that's probably more a positive than a negative, but if he says the controls are clunky, I'll probably agree. ACG tends to like games that are less mechanically adventious and easy compared to what I like, and we have evry different tastes in storylines, but he's a really good barometer for sound and graphics.

If kotaku or whatever releases a review it's really hard for me to understand whose voice I'm getting, so the review is pretty useless, how do I know if the guy calling the game a challenge is that infamous cuphead reviewer or a guy that has been beating dark souls since he was 4.

This article made a damn good point about how much gaming websites depend on guides now. It hasn’t really clicked until now with me. I follow a bot on Mastodon that posts new articles from a bunch of different gaming sites, and it seems like half of them are for guides and walkthroughs. That’s where they get their ad bucks from, so that and SEO are the big focus.

It’s Microsoft’s problem now. LOL

I feel like this is an article without a real story. Or at least it didn't succeed in finding the story

I wrote reviews(early 2000) during the late magazine era and even back then there were taboos about local influential company's releases.(they only sign import deal and sell/distribute games locally.) Cause they survive on the ad money instead of subscription or individual purchases. Modern website sucks even more cause you made pennies for each view and if you don't have something that covers enough contents to drive views, you will be at the mercy of promotion partners, same for the youtuber/streamer/influencer.

I mostly write review/walk through for import games, as there was usually a couple months delay for localization, even had contacts with local publisher that consult with group of writers about maybe which game to sign and import. The US/Japan publisher aren't exactly nice guys you know, they will ask you to sign multiple games, including the games you know might not sell well as part of the deal. It's a risky business and if companies that import games will try to influence review scores, you know how desperate the publisher will try to defend their "investment".