I often hear gamers talk about paid reviews, but from having communicated with countless publishers and their reps for review codes over a few years, I’ve never come across even a single attempt at influencing the upcoming review. You get an embargo and a press kit sometimes containing the known bugs that are expected to be fixed by the global release. Occasionally the press kit also contains a guide to the game.
There’s a lot you can do to influence the review that’s not literally paying for it. You can do everything paid trips to your studio for a preview, you can review embargo it until the release date, you can dictate what screenshots and videos they can use and at the worst you can just not send a review code to a publication that didn’t cooperate last time.
Or maybe you just have a rabid fanbase that thinks everything you shit out is gold so they harass reviewers that give a “low” score.
How do the screenshots and videos influence the score or impression from playing the actual game? How does the embargo affect anything about the review content? At worst, the players would just see the same review on the release day.
Even if everybody pre-orders, platforms like Steam do not count the pre-order period towards their two weeks policy, so you still get two weeks or two gameplay hours to decide.
It’s a half-remembered half-truth. The problem has always been that major gaming mags were seemingly afraid to mark down major games from major studios because they didn’t want to be denied review codes in the future, not that publishers were just up and buying good review scores.
Nowadays I’m not sure that that logic holds up in any case, since so much reviewing is done by small outlets and crowdsourcing, but it did seem like a legitimate concern in the days when a half dozen magazines were all the average person got.
major gaming mags were seemingly afraid to mark down major games from major studios because they didn’t want to be denied review codes in the future
Wasn’t it more/also they were worried about ongoing advertising deals? Like it wasn’t even necessarily the review staff themselves being in on it so much as the execs leaning on them to not threaten the revenue stream.
I often hear gamers talk about paid reviews, but from having communicated with countless publishers and their reps for review codes over a few years, I’ve never come across even a single attempt at influencing the upcoming review. You get an embargo and a press kit sometimes containing the known bugs that are expected to be fixed by the global release. Occasionally the press kit also contains a guide to the game.
There’s a lot you can do to influence the review that’s not literally paying for it. You can do everything paid trips to your studio for a preview, you can review embargo it until the release date, you can dictate what screenshots and videos they can use and at the worst you can just not send a review code to a publication that didn’t cooperate last time.
Or maybe you just have a rabid fanbase that thinks everything you shit out is gold so they harass reviewers that give a “low” score.
How do the screenshots and videos influence the score or impression from playing the actual game? How does the embargo affect anything about the review content? At worst, the players would just see the same review on the release day.
Even if everybody pre-orders, platforms like Steam do not count the pre-order period towards their two weeks policy, so you still get two weeks or two gameplay hours to decide.
It’s a half-remembered half-truth. The problem has always been that major gaming mags were seemingly afraid to mark down major games from major studios because they didn’t want to be denied review codes in the future, not that publishers were just up and buying good review scores.
Nowadays I’m not sure that that logic holds up in any case, since so much reviewing is done by small outlets and crowdsourcing, but it did seem like a legitimate concern in the days when a half dozen magazines were all the average person got.
Wasn’t it more/also they were worried about ongoing advertising deals? Like it wasn’t even necessarily the review staff themselves being in on it so much as the execs leaning on them to not threaten the revenue stream.
Yeah, I remember Kane and Lynch 2, a huge stinker, had a full banner ad on IGN that caused a lot of controversy with it’s review
Wasn’t it Jeff Gerstmann’s review on GameSpot which led to him being fired and creating Giant Bomb