Quote:
Originally Posted by Playbahnosh
Don't worry Pigggy, someone will pirate it for you. 
@Panthro
Well, the things I said are no real secrets. Ask any professional reviewer and they will have a similar story, I'm sure. The reason people don't trust us anymore, is, granted, we are as hopeless as the crowd sees us. If we don't deliver, the industry won't give us info. If the publisher doesn't like the reviews, they'll be reluctant to give you games to review in the future, or any info about upcoming releases. It's not that we want to suck up to the games industry, but rather most of us have no choice. In a smaller scale, if the General Editor (my boss) doesn't like my low scores for games, he will be reluctant to assign me games to review. That's it, sadly, the facts are quite clear. I'm trying to be as objective as I can, but it's not that easy, particularly regarding the big releases.
On the other hand, the hype is not helping either. Along the years, I learned to control my salivation, but I do fall for one or two campaigns still. The last one was Spore. I fell for it, it looked awesome, the vids were awesome, the pic were awesome and the premise was awesome. I got it for review, and it was....the sh*t compared to what I expected. It wasn't a bad game per say, but it was so much less than what they promised. I could only give it an average mark, and surprisingly my boss went along with that. I won't believe hype anymore. I wait, and see for myself. |
I've argued about this with PC Gamer staff members. They claim that their magazine is totally unaffected by pandering to publishers & developers and I found that hard to believe. As a magazine, you get so much competition and getting games early is vital or you end up having your reviews published over a month after most reviews have hit websites due to printing delays.
While PC Gamer (UK) does indeed give plenty of low scores, I've seen increasingly weird decisions made by the staff over the years. When PC Gamer was the best selling games magazine in Europe, they were in a very strong position and could kick any publisher in the balls so to speak - but back then, very few people had internet so they only had to compete with other magazines and if the publishers pissed PC Gamer off, bad scores could and would affect the sales of any given game since a large amount of people relied on those reviews.
Personally, I think that with all the reviews out there, all the competition between websites and magazine, that the publishers have it a lot easier to pull the strings and demand higher scores. After all, it's easy to go "well, we'll give the exclusive to site or magazine X then".