Poll of the Day > Does 2K place a review embargo on games? And why?

(+) Yeah! (+)

No way NBA 2k21 should be out for nearly a week and there not be any video reviews

Ive heard of some publishers doing that but it doesnt even sound legal. How does that work?

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/games/2020/09/06/nba-2k21-review-the-good-the-bad-and-the-bottom-line-for-current-gen-version/#7c00c35871f7

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You can only place a review embargo when you are providing pre-release copies of a game, once it is on sale to the public there is no way to stop people from doing reviews. There are plenty of reviews for the game, it has a pretty terrible score on Metacritic, and I was able to find a few video reviews.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJjas6e2ojM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypEdCHi8JqE

I heard it's terrible.

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rjsilverthorn posted...

You can only place a review embargo when you are providing pre-release copies of a game, once it is on sale to the public there is no way to stop people from doing reviews.

Pretty much. Even with pre-release copies, it's rarely so much a formal legal agreement as it is a thinly-veiled threat to not provide advance review copies of future games if you break it, but that threat doesn't apply once the game can be purchased by anyone.

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FatalAccident posted...

Does 2K place a review embargo on games?

Probably.



FatalAccident posted...

And why?

The most common reason for a review embargo is because you've shit out a crap game and know it, and are hoping pre-release hype and franchise loyalty will trick a bunch of idiots into buying your game before everyone realizes how terrible it is.



FatalAccident posted...

Ive heard of some publishers doing that but it doesnt even sound legal. How does that work?

It's legal, because they're not embargoing every person to ever play the game, just the people who get pre-release copies. And standard NDAs or embargos can be written into the contract you sign to get the copy in the first place. It's basically you agreeing "If you give me an early copy, I won't release a review until [insert date here]."

And they technically have the option to sue you if you break the terms of the contract and release your review anyway, but the more realistic scenario is that they just put you on a list where they will never, ever send you a pre-release copy for any game ever again. And since that sort of thing is usually handled by PR reps and not necessarily a publisher directly, that means if you get blacklisted, you might lose access to more than just that one publisher/developer's review copies. So most professional reviewers are pretty scrupulous about following the agreements.

The downside is, because most professional reviewers are scared of losing access, they can also be intimidated or bullied into censoring their own review and giving fluff scores to games that don't necessarily deserve them solely to maintain a good relationship with the publisher. Multiple reviewers have mentioned that after being savagely honest about a terrible game they were completely blacklisted - basically, publishers don't want you to give your honest opinions, they want you to act as a free PR/marketing arm of their ad campaign.

After release, anyone can buy a game and review it, but it does take time to actually play a game. Which is the whole reason why pre-release review copies are so valuable to review sites in the first place - the sooner you get your review out, the more traffic it gets. So people with review copies can play them for a while and write up their reviews, then release them fairly close to launch day, whereas people who have to go out and buy their own copy won't be able to get their own review out until days/weeks later. At which point, they get much fewer views.

This is another reason why some reviews (especially for RPGs) that come out close to launch can be utterly worthless - some reviewers have to buy their own copies, and the pressure to get a review out as quickly as possible means the reviewer has rushed through the game (and almost certainly not finished it) to get a review out quickly, so their review is incomplete at best and fatally flawed at worst.

This is why you're usually much better off just waiting for a month or two before buying - it gives time for honest and accurate user reviews to get out into the world, and it gives the developer time to patch all of the millions of bugs new games come standard with these days. There hasn't been a single game worth buying at launch for decades now.
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