LogFAQs > #959405951

Mead posted...

Ive seen plenty of folks flipping out acting like all reviews are bought and paid for, and a couple of anonymous forum posts cited as evidence

It's pretty common knowledge that making a habit of calling high-profile games out when they aren't very good is an excellent way to not get review copies from that company, which is a pretty big deal for any smaller reviewer because they rely on those high-profile games for a large percentage of their traffic. Get into larger reviewers, and you've got advertisers to keep happy, lest they lose their entire source of income. It's not usually as blatant as "developers are bribing reviewers," but the whole pre-release review system is definitely rigged to provide advertising for the games and not to actually help consumers make informed choices. That's why it's generally a lot better to wait for the game to release so reviewers that haven't sucked up enough to get pre-release copies can give their opinions.

Mead posted...

having a negative review for a popular game would actually be a good way to draw attention to your site

Generally, you see major diminishing returns on that once you get below 8/10, or 7/10 at the lowest, while dramatically increasing the likelihood of being blacklisted by the publisher. In the context of rabid pre-release hype, people will have intense arguments over anything remotely negative that is said about their perfect video game darling that they haven't played yet (even if it later turns out to be true). There was one reviewer that generally liked Cyberpunk and praised the game overall, but made the comment that it had some very high-risk seizure triggers in it (including suffering a grand mal seizure herself during the review process), and many people were so profoundly offended that she would dare criticize the game they loved so much that they sent her seizure trigger videos disguised as other videos (which constitutes physical assault, I might add). If all you're looking to do is generate extra traffic, you really don't have to give a significantly critical review. People will make any criticism controversial if they've already decided they like the game.

Beyond that, however, if your review is actually critical enough to amount to "you probably shouldn't buy the game" and ultimately hurt sales, publishers don't like that, while you don't increase traffic any more than a mildly critical review would. Generally speaking, you want to avoid getting on publishers' bad side as a reviewer unless you're prepared to limit yourself to post-release reviews on your own dime. Even then, if a Youtube-based reviewer pisses publishers (usually smaller ones) off enough, they may end up facing DMCA takedown attempts that can cost them their entire channel if they lack the resources to dispute it (generally speaking, Google won't actually listen to complaints about fraudulent takedowns unless you actually say "my lawyer and I are prepared to fight this if needed," so anyone without a lawyer is kind of boned).

Games journalism as a whole is pretty broken. As an industry, you cannot trust it to give you honest purchasing advice. You're far better off waiting for independent and user reviews post-release and buying games later than you will be if you let pre-release reviews guide launch day purchases.

---

This is my signature. It exists to keep people from skipping the last line of my posts.