Don’t misunderstand me though: I am not claiming these magazines and editors have been outright bribed by Ubisoft because that is something I pertinently deny. There are no lump payments of cash from PR-departments to the editors or the magazines they work for in order to directly influence what they write. It works much more subtle than that and often it’s a complex series of actions that are designed to try and shape the way editors write about certain games and handle certain content from certain publishers. In the end though it all boils down to what negative things you have written about a company and what positive things you have provided and might provide for them in the future.
And even when your coverage is not negative an editor, magazine or online media outlet might find itself on thin ice. When your coverage even if it is positive is not in line with what PR departments want you can expect repercussions: As I was walking around Microsoft’s private X06 event in Barcelona I noticed that Jean-Francois Mammet was not present. Jean is the owner of the French website Gamersyde ( www.gamersyde.com ) and I was expecting to meet him at the event. After the event I talked with him and he sadly had to tell me that Microsoft had revoked his invitation because a week prior he had set up a webcast of Microsoft’s TGS press conference, a press conference he thought he was allowed to cover.
For Jean this was a big disaster because while the website is now multi format back in those days it used to be known as Xboxyde and provided Xbox360 coverage exclusively. Microsoft’s message to him was simple, walk within the lines we have drawn for you. His readers of course had no knowledge of this and for them he was at fault for failing to provide the coverage he had promised them beforehand and which they had come to expect from him.
The readers then, yes most of you who are reading this right now are just as guilty to the state the games press is in as anybody else. The fanboys on all sides don’t want nor demand honest reporting: You want us to validate your opinions and anything else we do you see as a personal insult: A friend of mine, Christian Nutt was the first person allowed to review Fable and for the magazine he wrote for back then(GMR) he scored the game a respectable 8 out of 10. Yet Molyneux fanboys going by the insane hype and promises made for the game without ever having touched it decided that this was a low enough score to send him death threats.
I myself received my fair share of threats as well when I wrote that the CG show Sony put up at E3 2K5 was exactly that: A CG show, yet Sony at their press conference had declared it ALL GAMEPLAY so I deserved to die. The same thing happened later in 2005 when I was doing a round of interviews with Japanese developers. I posted on an internet forum that a spring 2006 release simply would not happen because the hard nor the software for the PS3 was anywhere ready to go live. Two days later I am back home and the threats kept coming calling me a fanboy, an affront to journalism, I should just kill myself because I am not worth being killed et cetera. Yet in these two examples both Christian and I did exactly what we are supposed to do, he gave a score he felt the game deserved and I reported what I knew was true.
Yet it is not what you want to read and that too is part of the problem. And that is how we end up with cold and grey tasteless porridge where the only games that receive a trashing in the press are those which we don’t have to fear a PR company or reader backlash from. Designed to please both the companies publishing videogames and the expectations of the public.
Some of you at this point might think isn’t there anyone out there who can be fully independent and commercially viable, someone who doesn’t take that crap. Well the short answer is NO, a longer answer is no because No because many have tried and only magazines like Continue in Japan have survived. In Holland we had Hoogspel the oldest Dutch games magazine close down in 2000 ( you can read here why http://www.hoogspel.nl/ for the non Dutch speaking people, they basically say the same things I do here, I might translate it if people care) because they refused to play ball. The thing with Continue in Japan however is that they do advertise new games, they just don’t review them. Instead their entire focus is retro and import games. In fact it was their championing of GTA III that made that game the most imported one in Japan and which convinced Capcom to pick it up for domestic release. So yes they can be honest and commercially viable because they do take in ads for new games but simply do not write about them, that and contrary to many Japanese game mags which are weekly or bi-weekly they are a monthly magazine.
Starting a new magazine or website that writes about current games and is entirely independent is simply impossible because you rely on the videogame publishers for your preview and review code, you rely on PR companies to get access to the developers of the games you write about. In short, in order to deliver news, previews and reviews in a timely manner we have to rely on them every step of the way. And our troubles don’t stop there because when we are late with a review because we pissed of a game publisher previously or whatever reason you the reader gets pissed at us as well. You also don’t want to read that your favorite game sucks, that its features were stolen wholesale from another better game that didn’t sell. You will get angry at me if I would dare trash MGS4 and call it a pile of pretentious bullshit, you simply do not allow us to have an opinion that might stray too far from yours. Yet at the same time you have the gall to look down on mister and missus casual gamer as inferior creatures because they are not HARDCORE like you and they DON’T UNDERSTAND GAMES like you do. How dare they play those Wii games just to kill some dead time between real life tasks. No you just want us to validate your own opinions and if they differ too much from yours we are clearly WRONG.
Who the hell do you think you are some of you are thinking at this point. Well I am Ali and I have been playing games since the 70s, since the early 90s in some capacity or another I have been involved in the videogame industry. Sometimes as an outsider when I was doing videogame retail and wholesale for instance and other times as an insider like I am now. The last few years I had the pleasure of conducting interviews with some of the biggest names in the industry OUTSIDE of the framework of a current title as most interviews are just PR-affairs designed to push an upcoming game.
I have had extensive chats with people like Yuji Naka, Shigeru Miyamoto, Mark Rein, Alexey Pajitnov, Yuzo Koshiro , Tomonobu Itagaki and countless others. I asked them the hard questions and afterwards posed with them while giving them the bunny ears ( V sign behind their head ). For PR companies I am not interesting because giving coverage for the next title they need to push is not what I do. I provide depth and backgrounds, I ask the questions others don’t or are not allowed to ask(and even then I am not always allowed to publish). The PR companies over here rarely if ever invite me to their events and I get forced to talk with personal contacts abroad to get the info I could have gotten locally in the first place.
I fully understand their reasoning’s though: Why invest time in me, someone who does not provide them bulletpoints in the next job evaluation they will undergo to see how well they did their jobs. How many mentions they managed in the magazines and websites or how many magazine covers they could score for their next (deservedly or undeservedly) big game. What matters for PR-companies is push their games as hard as they can and preferably with a neat plan that increases the hype as time goes by, not just for the readers but towards us in the press as well. In that regard we from the press(all of us) and the actual developers of the games are elements that can mess up their neatly organized PR campaigns.
And for that they hate us: They invite us to lush parties with food and booze to push the big titles yet they cant directly control what we write, which proves again that we are NOT in their pockets as some of you seem to believe. If we were they wouldn’t go trough all the trouble of setting up those events, no it would be much simpler. If you want to bribe someone you give them money and you say here is some cash and my game is a 9 out of 10. The simple fact that they go to great lengths at the events they organize is proof of and on itself that outright bribing simply does not happen. The developers too are hated because they might do something silly like change features in a game that PR was hyping or(God forbid) delay a game because they feel it is not ready to go live yet as things like that might mess up their neat little plan for promoting said title.
Wow I just checked and I have already written well over 3000 words yet I feel like I have only scratched the surface as the problems the games press are facing are way bigger and more complex then I have written about here. Maybe best if I end this with a few examples of media miss behavior that most people have no knowledge about.
IGN as the biggest games media site out there(there are others with similar software) has this thing called gamermetrics which is used as a marketing tool. What it does is look at and analyze the behavior of gamers online, on websites in forums etcetera. The gathered information is then used to market products and ads. In that regard for IGN a forum post with recurring words that push a certain thing becomes far more profitable then any article, review or interview they publish. Big Brother is not just watching you, its analyzing your movements, actions, words and then sells the data so it can be marketed back to you.
EDGE is a universally respected magazine but even they have made grave mistakes and have been abused by commercial departments in the past : The mid nineties are closing in and future publishing (publisher of EDGE magazine) is in a huge fight with EMAP(a publisher no longer involved in games media) who has good relations with and publishes single format magazines of Sega and Nintendo. Along comes Sony and they make it clear that they wouldn’t mind one of them to publish an official Playstation magazine to complement their upcoming entry into the console business.
Knowing that EMAP is already close with Sega and Nintendo Future decides that they need to do whatever they can to make sure EMAP does not get the official Playstation license. And thus EDGE is abused to hype the Playstation to high heavens and downplay Sega every chance they get. When both machines release in Japan immediately all sorts of excuses were used to downplay the fact that the Saturn was actually selling better then the PS1 and they start to circulate rumors that Sega will release a new Saturn that will have similar power to the PS1(making the first revision obsolete). Game reviews too are used to hype the PS1 over the Saturn and thus they declare Ridge Racer to be arcade perfect and the fact that it has only 1 track to be no problem at all. Sega rally on the other hand is ugly and with its paltry 3 tracks(nevermind the fact it has 4) has not enough content. Mission accomplished future scores the OPM license.
If you think that example is a bit too light take the EDGE-mantra from those years: The bible of gaming, the most authoritive reviews in the industry, we only review finished software et cetera. And along comes a game called Turok 2 and attached to the same issue the game is reviewed in was an advertorial pocket magazine which obviously was paid for by Acclaim and which featured content apparently written by EDGE staff. The review of Turok 2 in the actual magazine was filled with praise and superlatives about how good the game was so after reading it one was left wondering why the game ONLY received 9 out of 10 instead of the perfect 10 it clearly deserved(up to that point only Mario64 ever received a perfect 10 from EDGE) . Thing is(not even taking into account the advertorial magazine) there was a little problem, at the time the EDGE review appeared in the magazine the game still had 4 months of development to go. What was that about not being influenced by game publishers, bible of gaming, our reviews are gospel truth etcetera?
The biggest games magazine in the world is an American one called Game Informer. With over 3 million readers it is more then twice the size of EGM which is better known here. Just like gamefan with which I started this article Game Informer magazine started out in the early 90s. It used to be a mini magazine that was given away for free in what was then the Funcoland stores, these days the magazine is owned by the biggest games retailer in the world. A behemoth called Gamestop who under its various brands owns more then 5000 retail outlets all over the world. It is always bad for the consumers when the same company that sells you a product is the same one that unbeknownst to most is the one who owns the media that writes about said products. The editors there mostly do a great job staying independent but controversy was stirred when in 2004 one of the editors said what he shouldn’t have. Quote: When reviewing a game we have to take into account how well a game will appeal to the masses . In other words, if the game will sell well anyway but might sell better for Gamestop with a better score feel free to turn that 8 into a 9.
In Japan Enterbrainīs Famitsu magazine is biggest and the easiest one to get high scores from, it is at least if your company name is either Square-Enix or Nintendo. Some companies have agreements with Enterbrain that dictate certain scores for their games and the only thing the editors can do is hand their scores and be creative in what little they are allowed to write about said games. So when Square-Enix was preparing to release FF VII-Dirge of Cerberus the editors of Famitsu magazine had a huge problem on their hands. Here is a game that can best be described as a festering bug riddled corpse(believe it or not but the release we got in the west while still being unplayable shit was hugely improved upon from its original Japanese release) but they are obligated to give it at least four 7s because that’s the minimum for any Square-enix game.
At that point the writers for Famitsu became creative and while they usually have their reviews ready a few days before a game releases(perfectly possible because they are a weekly games magazine) the release of the game came and went with no review published. The week after that still nothing, one week later and the game was still not reviewed. After three weeks(and I am sure a lot of pressure from Enterbrain and Square-Enix the editors of Famitsu finally saw fit to review the game. While there was criticism in the texts of the review it still scored its mandatory 7s and thus netted a Famitsu silver award. For the Japanese customers it was obvious Famitsu did what they had to and by waiting 3 weeks with their review the sales of the game had already dropped dead thanks to the mouth to mouth trashing it received from the public so by the time Famitsu reviewed the title they knew their silver award would no longer matter at all.
Andrew Vestal, an ex games journalist who back then lived in Japan in my opinion said it best when he wrote: a 7/7/7/7 game delayed THREE times from the official release date sends a different message. It admits you're the publisher and we're the Japanese press and we have to do what you say, but we're not even going to pretend there's a single person out there who could like this piece of shit. You're getting the lowest possible score from all of our reviewers that still nets you your Silver [award].”
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