Game Reviews Fixed?

[Diff-chan]

NG's editorial content was fantastic, but their reviews were generally graphics/buzzword-whore rubbish. According to internet lore they even had an internal policy that no 2D game could ever get higher than 2/4 stars.

UMM... two things here:

01. The maximum amount of stars was 5, not 4.
02. Yoshi's Island got 5 stars. SOTN got 4 stars. Rayman got 4 stars. Worms got 4 starsBlood Omen Legacy of Kain got 4 stars. Cannon Fodder got 4 stars. SSF2T on 3DO got 4 stars. Bust A Move 3 got 4 stars. Two 2D Mac games got 4 stars (I have an old issue in front of me with a review roundup section). So... I dont think this policy you speak of existed.

Yea...

Their reviews were "safe" and predictable and they mis-lead anyone who made buying decisions based on their reviews.

I bought games based on their reviews and I was never led astray. Not even once. On the other hand, I bought like 3 games based on GameFan/GameGo!/ECM fawning and was burned... 3 times. I will also remind you that the two GG! issues that came out (one was just in PDF, but whatever) had (01) Stretch Panic, and (02) Hoshigami on the cover. And they were definitely "a bunch of fanboys who are passionate about what they like".

[haohmaru]

TK's school of Video Game Magazines says:

1.) No magazine in this era can survive on subscriptions alone.
2.) Review product seems to directly correlate to:
a.) The size of the publication
b.) The financial strength of the publication
c.) The past review scores for that company's product in that particular magazine
3.) The notion of *any* mainstream magazine being "unbiased" is utterly naive.
4.) Companies that provide review products are VERY interested in what you write about them and how much coverage they are going to get.
5.) Advertising revenue is directly linked to review scores. As unbelievable as it may sound, the better the scores a company gets from a certain publication, the more likely that company is to advertise with that publication.
6.) The only true way to really get unbiased reviews is for the magazine to pay for their own review copies and rely on people to support them. The problems with this are:
a.) That magazine will always be even later than magazines are now, because they won't have early copies to review from and sales will suffer from that fact.
b.) See 1.) above
c.) It's a horrible business model.

Reviews are biased, online and in print, and always will be until the "gaming public" decides that fair and unbiased reviews are worth paying extra for. I think you'll be waiting for quite some time before that scenario ever presents itself.

[Mzo]

Vice City got a 10. I just remembered that.

Ugh.

[Opaque]

Vice City got a 10. I just remembered that.

Ugh.

You. Going. Hell.

[NeoZeedeater]

So... I dont think this policy you speak of existed.

I wouldn't say they had an anti-2d policy per se but they tended to be extra harsh on 2d or old-fashioned games even when they were great games. And then you would have stuff like Turok 2 getting five stars. It was a great mag for interviews and articles but I found their reviews unreliable.

[StriderKyo]

UMM... two things here:

01. The maximum amount of stars was 5, not 4.

Didn't they change it towards the end? Or am I imagining things?

02. Yoshi's Island got 5 stars. SOTN got 4 stars. Rayman got 4 stars. Worms got 4 starsBlood Omen Legacy of Kain got 4 stars. Cannon Fodder got 4 stars. SSF2T on 3DO got 4 stars. Bust A Move 3 got 4 stars. Two 2D Mac games got 4 stars (I have an old issue in front of me with a review roundup section). So... I dont think this policy you speak of existed.

I got rid of my old mags 2 moves ago, but I think they changed EICs midway through the 32 bit era and with him came the policy. Even if it didn't exist as a set in stone rule, they were still quite content to knock any game for not using the buzzword of the moment. They were way too focused on graphics and technology.

[ferricide]

So you didn't feel that their holding onto games until the point where any review would be published post-release was an effort to pressure magazines into doing them favours? That was the impression I got reading between the lines of a few editorials Shoe wrote, but feel free to correct me.

well i think it's more to the point that nintendo is just generally uncooperative. i don't think they blackmail good scores out of magazines. then again, they might, but it's never happened at any of the publications i've worked at, online or print. i can imagine it happening at others.

NG's editorial content was fantastic, but their reviews were generally graphics/buzzword-whore rubbish. According to internet lore they even had an internal policy that no 2D game could ever get higher than 2/4 stars.

the legend i've heard is that no 2D game could get higher than 4/5 because it wasn't groundbreaking. don't know if it's true. i hated NG's reviews as well but quite liked the rest of the magazine. don't know how i'd feel about their reviews now, but at the time they didn't speak to me at all. eventually i stopped buying it because the internet was invented. it turned to shit anyway.

EGM was pretty much the first genuinely independent newsstand review publication, so I hope people aren't lumping you guys in with the Game Informers of the world.

well, i work for GMR, FWIW. same publisher as EGM, of course.

to refute what haoh said in the quickest way possible, i will just blanketly state that i have never once been pressured to change a review score (or been suggested what i ought to give a game) to make a game's publisher happy at any publication where i've ever worked.

only one game i scored had its score argued up significantly in a way that made me even slightly uncomfortable (more than a point) by the EIC. it wasn't directly related to advertising, but more to do with the audience of the mag and their percieved potential like for said game. still a bad reason, of course. it had no relationship to ad dollars whatsoever.

i routinely turn in assignments and the scores appear in the books/on the sites, with no argument (or even comment) from the assigning editors. this has been the case at gamespot, gamespy and at ziff davis. even when i was freelancing for OXM, as much as you'd suspect they inflate their scores. of course, sometimes editors have confirmed why i've given games out-of-the-ordinary scores, but if i back up my decision with valid arguments, then they leave it alone. typically this involves the assigning editor's desire to grade down games, mind you, not up.

the common perception by some that scores are fixed or manipulated or bought simply isn't true for all publications (or even perhaps the majority of them.) if anything, i'd suggest the ones that you can point to as being routinely unreliable in this department are more likely to be succumbing to self-imposed internal pressures to be generally positive rather than specific pressures on a game-by-game basis.

an amatureish tendency to fall for hype also hurts some pubs (this goes back to what diffx said about unprofessionalism.) even at the bad pubs, i think it's rare for something so blatant as score fixing for external reasons to take place (yes, it's happened, and i'm even aware of specific cases that i won't share.) it's also fairly obvious which pubs lie and when, but i pay closer attention to this sort of thing.

humans are inherently incapable of being truly objective. we do what we can, and the rest is informed by taste and whim, not external pressure.

[RoleTroll]

I liked the way Diehard GameFan did their game reviews. You rate each game on a scale of 1 to 10, but put a 9 in front of it: a 9/10 is a 99% and a 4.5/10 is a 94.5%. Everyone is happy.

[Mzo]

You. Going. Hell.

What?

Do you honestly believe 3 separate, fully cognisant human beings would score Vice City as a perfect 10?

And, for what it's worth, I think GMR kicks ass. I actually have every issue so far (with every alternate cover =X )

[MarsKitten]

Thing is until videogames reach the status of say: sports, like getting ratings to new games on the evening news, there won't be independant gaming journalism outside of the shit we do on the forums. There just isn't the money from the subscriber base, or the support of the publishers for an independant media. Subscribers cannot afford it, and the publishers wanna move inventory not get honest reporting.

When game magizines garner the advetizing dollars from another source outside the gaming industry itself, then we'll see the start of gaming journalism.