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Re: It would be nice if video game sites did actual journalism
Videogame journalism has always sucked and mostly always will suck. Most videogame journalists have very little, to no, actual journalism experience. They are, by and large, extra-literate gamers. The lone exception, industry wide, is Joystiq, where the writers are clever, intelligent, and, foremost, they are journalists. Unfortunately, Joystiq gives barely more than a passing glance at the annual sports games because they simply aren't sports gamers.
Further, the level of advertising, promotion, and hands outs in the videogame industry is laughable. I used to be a Community Leader, back in the day, for the MVP series... and how can you not come back hyped, reporting how excellent a game is when EA wines and dines you in Vancouver, BC for three days, while simultaneously playing videogames non-stop all day. Those community play weeks persist as some of my favorite travel experiences: it was all paid for by a company who's games you paid for already, and now they're flying you across the continent, putting you up in a swanky downtown hotel, buying you beers, ordering a filet mignon, and you're playing their game during the day. MVP was a quality game, not without its flaws, but I came back from those events optimistic and positive, ready to promote the hell out of their product to tens of thousands of potential consumers. It goes beyond the community leader, however: videogame sites get almost all of their real advertising revenue from the products that they're supposed to be trying to review fairly. I know from experience: it is impossible to be impartial to a game, developer, or publisher when they throw advertising money at you and you know that they read their site.
Finally, it is the consumers expectations that hamstring the game journalism sector. We expect reviews on or before release day: an absurd task when reviewing something that is typically more indepth than another product. Reviewing a movie on release or just prior to release makes sense, but reviewing a game, start to finish, on release day is like performing a book review and doing it in a matter of one day. In an ideal world, videogame reviews would be like book reviews: they wouldn't be scored with some arbitrary number, but rather, they would set out to make a point, with the game being the backdrop to the point being made by the journalist. It will, however, never happen.
So, for now, we're stuck. The best way to get back at the developer who makes a lousy game or leaves in game-destroying glitches is to sell your game on Amazon, Ebay, or Craigslist. You get most of your money back and the publisher gets nothing on the sale.
(edit, I should add, I like the sports opinion by this site more so than of other mainstream sites because they usually get into the nitty gritty. But, at the same time, OS is usually delayed in their reviews because they have that dedication to the details... so as long as our expectations are the same and videogame reviews are what they are, we're stuck).
Last edited by Rebel10; 07-22-2010 at 09:06 PM.
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07-22-2010, 05:31 PM
