Comment on More than 1,200 games journalists have left the media in the last two years | VGC
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 10 hours agoBut weren’t game reviews essentially ads paid by the publisher? Because that’s what it looks like from the outside, since the reviews are increasingly poor quality that largely focus on positives and ignore negatives. Some games that completely flopped due to technical issues got glowing reviews by journalists, probably because they were paid handsomely for that review.
I think game journalists should avoid advertisements as much as possible because once they rely on it, the temptation to allow their content to be colored by whatever attracts advertisers is too much. They should be solely focused on attracting readers, which means they need to be reader supported.
In America, they are legally required to disclose paid reviews. If the company pays for the review they legallt must disclose it
If you receive free products or other perks with the expectation that you’ll promote or discuss the advertiser’s products in your blog, the FTC Act applies to you.
Is that actually enforced? If so, what’s the explanation for reviewers giving suspiciously high reviews to AAA games?
Is that actually enforced?
Surprisingly so. There’s a huge difference in online advertisements pre- and post-Fyre Festival.
If so, what’s the explanation for reviewers giving suspiciously high reviews to AAA games?
They liked the game more than you. I promise you it is that simple.
I’m not talking about my personal preference on rating, I’m talking about broad community reviews.
For example, Cyberpunk 2077 is a notorious example. It got generally favorable reviews from reviewers, and the public release was a completely broken pile of trash on console. Reviews didn’t even get the console release, yet still gave it a positive review because the experience on PC was decent. How can we trust reviewers if they don’t actually try the game? The terms of the review embargo alone should have pushed reviewers to give it net negative reviews since they’re not able to actually try the game.
For strict review differences, look at Starfield, which got 85% by Metacritic, and Steam reviews are more like 55-60%, and it got hit hard by independent reviewers shortly after launch. That’s a pretty big mismatch.
GTA V was pretty close to a perfect score, but actual reception was a bit lower (80% or so on Steam right now). That’s not a huge difference, and it could be due to frustration about not having a sequel for over a decade, but it does seem that some studios get more favorable reviews/more of a pass than others.
That said, a lot of the time reviews are pretty close to the eventual community response. It just seems that reviewers overhype certain games. I haven’t really seen much evidence where critics review a game much below where the community reception is, but I have seen cases where reviewer scores are quite a bit higher than the eventual community response.
Maybe there’s nothing suspicious going on, it just sometimes feels that way.
As someone who’s done this before, let me tell you it’d be much easier for Toby Fox to pay me to give Undertale a good review than it would for Ubisoft to pay me to give Rayman a good review.
Are you talking from a regulatory standpoint or from an “I like indies so I’d give it a pass” standpoint?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
It’s a symbiotic relationship that advances goals for each, but no, they’re not paid ads, and it’s been debunked over and over again. Some game reviews higher than someone feels it should, and they conclude it only could have been paid off, but it wasn’t. Here are a few things that do happen that influence review scores though:
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
This makes a lot of sense.
It would be nice if multiple people reviewed each game, and then they discuss before publishing a review. That’s one thing I really like about Digital Foundry, though they focus way more on technical details than overall gaming experience, but it’s very fun to see what each reviewer has to say about a given title.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
That’s often a matter of resources. Staff sizes are only getting smaller at these outlets, and there are more games released each year than ever before; and they’re trending toward being longer on top of that. Being able to get multiple people to review a single game is a luxury, one that Digital Foundry can afford when they just need to benchmark a typical scene in the game.