games™ Forum

Whats this about you having an opinion?!

Well, this says it all really.

Penny Arcade's take on the matter

It's long been a problem in games journalism, PR pressure.

Absolutely disgusting. "How dare you not like our game, you're fired".

Never mind the fact that K+L IS an average game, and 6 is about right.

What's next, getting fired for dissing Need for Chavs Speed?

Yowser!
If nothing else seeing that many adverts on a site would make me puke. Ah, good old ad-block.

As a inquiry, do you think there is pressure by advertisers on Edge and GamesTM for favourable reviews?

Did anyone else notice IGN's 9.0 review for PES2008? Guess who's one of the main in-game advertisers?

It wasn't the score but the tone of the review that got him sacked. I thought the review was quite poor myself and it was odd that it got a 6 when he had nothing nice to say about it.

He didn't say it was bad though, he said it was average for the genre and big fans of the genre would be highly dissapointed, he actually reccomended the multiplayer side of things.

He was giving his honest opinion of the game, and surely thats exactly what he was being paid to do? Obviously not now though.

It just shows that there's no point of being or employing "a reviewer". An average from a random unbiased sample for each game will provide enough information as to whether or not you should buy the game.

Saying that though, Gamespot did give Fusion Frenzy 2 7/10, which is a fairer score than that of the average score...

dante76 wrote:As a inquiry, do you think there is pressure by advertisers on Edge and GamesTM for favourable reviews?

There may be pressure, but I seriously doubt those two mags give in to it. After all - Assassin's Creed, 4/10.

Apparently the Eidos forums are not a fun place to be - the droppings are striking the rotating ventilation device rather heavily!

http://forums.eidosgames.com/

"We are currently making a change to the forums. They will be up shortly. Please check back later."

Guess the Eidos staff are busy.

Verdugo wrote:http://forums.eidosgames.com/

"We are currently making a change to the forums. They will be up shortly. Please check back later."

Guess the Eidos staff are busy.

It's back up now, it looks like they've tried to do a purge.

There are no new posts since yesterday or the early hours of this morning, the forums are closed for posting, and there's not a single mention of this whole business.

I was about to make a thread on this.. Beat me to it.

Anyway, they're covering the story all over the place.

http://gamepolitics.com/2007/11/30/free-jeff-gerstmann/

And:

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/11/30/eidos ... -incident/

And those are just two I found at random. It'll be on Kotaku and Destructoid by now, and the rest of the gaming bloggs too, i'd imagine.

The damage limitation exercise from Gamespot and Eidos will be a beautiful thing to behold.

There will be corporate language, talk of 'long term issues' and 'other factors', there will be retractions, and 'no comments', and all the while Gamespot is plastered with banners advertising the game at the centre of it all, while eidos have purged all mention of it from their message boards.

Of course no-one will put their hands up to this being the reason he was let go. Its hardly grounds for dismissal is it?.

Suddenly though the game PR business has its laundry on display, and its decidedly grubby. Although its unlikely (since they would prefer to remain employed), but there might be some overt support from other games reviewers confirming exactly what goes on between review sites/mags and publishers, what pressure they are put under to carry favourable reviews for advertisers, and exactly how deep that particular rabbit hole goes.

Of course it could also all be internet conspiracy theorists and anarchists and the man in question was quite properly let go, due to 'other factors'.

FatTrucker wrote:The damage limitation exercise from Gamespot and Eidos will be a beautiful thing to behold.

There will be corporate language, talk of 'long term issues' and 'other factors', there will be retractions, and 'no comments', and all the while Gamespot is plastered with banners advertising the game at the centre of it all, while eidos have purged all mention of it from their message boards.

Of course no-one will put their hands up to this being the reason he was let go. Its hardly grounds for dismissal is it?.

Suddenly though the game PR business has its laundry on display, and its decidedly grubby. Although its unlikely (since they would prefer to remain employed), but there might be some overt support from other games reviewers confirming exactly what goes on between review sites/mags and publishers, what pressure they are put under to carry favourable reviews for advertisers, and exactly how deep that particular rabbit hole goes.

Of course it could also all be internet conspiracy theorists and anarchists and the man in question was quite properly let go, due to 'other factors'.

Well, I know bitparade's supply of Sony published stuff was cut after an average review of Gangs of London and thats kind of big for a small,, independant site run in peoples spare time.