Journalistic integrity, paid reviews and so on.

[Gare]

So what do you guys all think of this? I am of course talking about some reviewers apparently getting paid to give a game a better score or something, or just being influenced in one way or another, whether or not they realize it. How often do you think it happens and can you think of any notable examples (that maybe even caused online drama, for instance)?

As such, do you trust mainstream gaming sites these days? Also, what are the review sites (or individual people, video makers, such as TotalBiscuit, etc.) that you personally *do* trust for an honest opinion? Do you think bigger Youtube reviewers are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing?

Discuss and stuff.

[Zaladane]

Well payola as it's called has been around since the radio days and nothing new really. I don't even often read reviews or heck even game news really anymore for that matter. I'll judge for myself and listen to some of the members here

In short, no I don't for the most part trust reviews for anything.

I think there's very little Journalistic integrity in any medium.

2 cents.

[Warrior]

I normally trust what actual players review on Gamefaqs, magazines and actual PAID critics are normally full of shit and I never listen to them.

[Englebert3rd]

I usually check Gamerankings, I'm not following any magazines nor gaming websites. I usually listen to what the others think about the game. Also this topic title reminded me of the Dorito Pope!

[Gare]

Also this topic title reminded me of the Dorito Pope!

Took me a moment to realize what this referred to, but damn. That image is golden gold.

As for me, I sometimes check RPS for reviews, but I don't always blindly believe everything that's said. And the Gamefaqs forums are actually useful sometimes, where a wide variety of people give in-depth impressions and such -- same goes for the Steam forums. Although, it's always possible that seeing a lot of negativity only means a vocal minority while the others are too busy enjoying a game to sign up on forums.

[Drageuth]

My two cents on reviews:

If you read a wide variety of reviews from a number of different sites about the same game, it tends to give you a pretty good picture of what the game is going to be like. Say, take a site like Metacritic -- ignore the top 3 reviews and the bottom 3 reviews and read two or three that in the middle of the pack, and you'll probably get a general sense of what the game is like. That is, completely ignore the score giveen and read the review. Number based scoring systems are open to wide interpretation. What I might give a 6/10 might be someone else's idea of a 7/10, because they think anything rated 6 or lower is essentially a waste of time.

Then you kind of have to factor in reviewer bias towards that specific genre or series. I tend not to trust any reviews at all about the huge popular games (Grand Theft Auto, Elder Scrolls, Marios, Zeldas, Call of Duty, etc) because most people are so deeply in love with those series that it is sometimes hard to actually see the flaws in the game. I know I'm like that with Zelda games -- even if the game isn't perfect or doesn't make sense, I'll still rate a Zelda game 9.5/10 almost every time.

As for purchasing reviews... yeah, it happens, and likely always will. I think the bigger concern is reviewers receiving special promotional packages that also enhance their view of the game. Receiving a reviewers copy with special perks like figurines or general merchandise creates a goodwill towards the game that will most likely shine through into the review where they want to say something good about it because they were treated well when they started playing it.

There's also the problem of most reviewers on the big sites (IGN, Machinima, EGM, Eurogamer, and probably hundreds more that I can't think of at the moment) don't actually pay for all of their games. If they don't have the $60 investment into a title that the rest of us make on Day 1, then they will likely view the game in a more positive light, or downplay the flaws because they didn't seem like a big deal to them at $0, but it would be a huge deal to us for $60, or even $30 if we wait a year for the price to drop. I'm not sure how well most reviewers can separate "playing for work" from "playing for pleasure," but I have sensed that because some reviewers are playing a game "for work," they aren't coming at it from the same mindset as someone who has a small amount of time they can commit to any game at a time, and therefore things that might bother the average gamer doesn't bother the reviewer, because they're sitting there playing for 6-8 hours in "work mode."

I don't know how much of this is actually true, but it's a sense that I've gotten while reading.

[Cookie Monster]

I don't really pay attention to reviewers or mainstream gaming sites, as in I don't have any favourite that I follow regularly, some days I check Eurogamer, some others I go with Gamerankings and some others with spanish sites like Vandal. Good way to not get intoxicated by illegitimate interests...

I do purchase some local magazines every month. I used to love the work of some reviewers because their taste in games always was very similar to mine -been following some of them for over 15 years now- but unfortunately some of them do not work in the industry anymore :/

In general, who writes an article isn't relevant for me (don't really check who wrote it), unless it's someone I know (Gare, Tan.. ).

[Gare]

@Drag: Yeah, scores are kinda silly. It inevitably leads to unfair comparisons and "if you gave this X, then how could you give that Y" statements. So I don't get the obsession with with numbers. And like you pointed out, in some instances a 7/10 could mean "good" while for others it could mean pure mediocrity.

There's also the problem of most reviewers on the big sites (IGN, Machinima, EGM, Eurogamer, and probably hundreds more that I can't think of at the moment) don't actually pay for all of their games. If they don't have the $60 investment into a title that the rest of us make on Day 1, then they will likely view the game in a more positive light, or downplay the flaws because they didn't seem like a big deal to them at $0, but it would be a huge deal to us for $60, or even $30 if we wait a year for the price to drop. I'm not sure how well most reviewers can separate "playing for work" from "playing for pleasure," but I have sensed that because some reviewers are playing a game "for work," they aren't coming at it from the same mindset as someone who has a small amount of time they can commit to any game at a time, and therefore things that might bother the average gamer doesn't bother the reviewer, because they're sitting there playing for 6-8 hours in "work mode."

Surely we can't expect reviewers to buy *everything* they review. I'd imagine many of these people have to review tons of games at a time, you can't expect them to spend half their salaries to cover the costs of games. Regardless of what you think of big name reviewers, games are needed for them to be able to do their jobs, so I think it's unreasonable to say they should drop the 60 bucks on every new title that comes out.

Btw, shouldn't it be the other way around? If you paid full price for a game on day 1, you're more likely to be lenient with it since it was an investment and you want to feel better about the hard-earned cash you've just spent. At least that's how I view it.

Yeah, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if "work mode" could influence a review, although I'm not sure.

[Aeolus Aeneas]

For me, any person or company who gets money for writing articles or reviews from an industry they supposedly cover, then they are shills for them and are invalid sources of information until months after the fact, because that's when I know they may be honest.

I have not, nor will I ever trust people who gets paid for this nonsense, nor will I trust anybody who gets their information from them. Not that I can really trust unpaid reviews, since a lot of them will kiss any ass for the mere whiff of the concept that they could get paid to do so.

[Drageuth]

I'm definitely not saying that they should buy every game. That would be ridiculous. I just think that having a monetary investment in anything invokes a different mindset on how you perceive the product, and is another reason why reviews can be skewed in either direction.

I also tend to be harsher on games that I buy Day 1 because I've just spent $60 on it and I want it to be everything that I had dreamed of while seeing the previews/trailers/hype machine that came before it. My go-to example of this was Uncharted 3. The vast majority of reviews out there rated it extremely well -- according to Metacritic, 24 different sites gave it a 10/10 (or whatever their equivalent was) -- and countless others gave it extremely high scores (9/10 or higher). Yet when I played it, all I noticed was all of the lackluster set-piece designs, my allies constantly getting in my way, and what I will generally refer to as "bullshit enemy AI" where moving between certain sections of the game was more about combating luck or memorizing enemy patterns, and less about "stealth and cover tactics."

Everyone is different. Some people will use their investment as a justification for glossing over flaws, and some people don't. I can't say I'm perfect in that regard -- I did pay full price for Lollipop Chainsaw and like to tell myself it was a great game when it really probably wasn't -- but it's one of the problems that surfaces when reading someone else's account of a game. In regards to Uncharted 3, I think it also might explain why (again, according to Metacritic), it received an aggregated 92/100 from reviewers and only an 83/100 from users. There has to be an explanation for that, whether it's "reviewers getting paid" or "hidden biases going into the game." I personally think monetary investment is a hidden bias that skews scores or impressions of a game, and how it is interpreted is up to the individual.

[Cyberxion]

So what do you guys all think of this? I am of course talking about some reviewers apparently getting paid to give a game a better score or something, or just being influenced in one way or another, whether or not they realize it. How often do you think it happens and can you think of any notable examples (that maybe even caused online drama, for instance)?

As such, do you trust mainstream gaming sites these days? Also, what are the review sites (or individual people, video makers, such as TotalBiscuit, etc.) that you personally *do* trust for an honest opinion? Do you think bigger Youtube reviewers are just as vulnerable to this sort of thing?

Discuss and stuff.

I honestly don't give half a squirt of piss about games journalism at large, inasmuch as the opinions of folks I don't know from Adam have never really interested me. However, I take issue with the accusation, if only because there's no proof of it. There's plenty of speculation, sure, but when I consider that a fair number of us tend to sit in the comments sections on any given website and pitch shit-fits whenever a critic expresses an opinion about a game that differs from how we decided we were gonna feel about it months before ever getting the chance to play it ourselves, it's really difficult for me to interpret it as much more than the work of folks who are trying really, really hard to find a way to discredit games journalism as a means to compensate for their inability to accept opinions that differ from their own.

Look, I sincerely don't know if this does or doesn't happen. That's the point, really. Outside of what happened to Jeff Gerstmann at Gamespot -which was owed more to the incestuous relationship between journalists and publishers with respect to the reliance by the former upon the latter for ad revenue than it did straight-up payolla- there's nothing that really speaks to it happening, and happening on as large a scale as some folks suggest it does. Until that proof comes to light I'm not comfortable with assuming the worst of an entire field of journalism, regardless of how useless it is to me personally.

That having been said, I feel like all of this kind of misses the point. These critics are just videogame enthusiasts the same as you or me. That they get paid to share them doesn't make their opinions inherently more worthwhile than the next guy's, and besides, even when written under the best of circumstances a review is only ever going to be the wholly subjective opinion of a single participant in a hobby that is enjoyed by millions, each with their own standards and preferences. As such, I feel like there's no need for all of this speculation because we should be taking reviews with a grain of salt as a rule regardless.