Shrapnel Games Blog

I’m guessing by now you’ve read about the whole Gamespot/Eidos brouhaha. Sorta hard not to. Reading through all the different takes on the situation is pretty freaking exhausting, and frankly rather pointless at the moment. Practically everything you read is based on conjecture and gossip, which is then spun further and picked up by someone else and turned into more questionable content.

Like most Internet Outrages Of Monstrous Proportions the torch and pitchfork wielding mob (or should we call them a lynch mob?) will soon disperse, the original transgression that they rallied against forgotten. Why, it just seems like yesterday the Jade Raymond comic had everyone ready to storm the gates, and before that…I don’t know, Jeff Minter freaking out about Space Giraffe ratings? Jack Thompson? Has Derek Smart made any comments lately?

The basis of this current situation of course stems from the appearance that a reviewer got canned because the publisher–who was spending mucho amounts of cash on advertising at the site—did not quite appreciate the average score their game got. In turn you have editors of every conceivable gaming publication going to Yellow Alert, raising their shields, and telling everyone that advertising revenue has nothing to do with the way they treat games. Any such suggestion that it happens that way would of course be birthed from the fevered imagination of gamers who probably also see black helicopters and wear tinfoil hats. Sane folks know it’s not true.

Anyone else believe that?

Look, for the most part I don’t think for a second that the actual reviews are fudged based on a ratio of how much ad revenue that the game’s publisher is putting into a site/publication’s coffers (note I said for the most part) but money does affect the way the game is handled in a number of other ways: “exclusive” first reviews, extensive previews, cover/frontpage stories, and so forth. I promise you that if an indie game came out that was the greatest game ever created, one that raised the dead and healed the sick, if they weren’t spending tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising you still wouldn’t hear about it. (As if you hear about indie gaming today!) You would hear about Crappy Sequel XVII with a million dollar marketing budget, even if it had no redeeming qualities, though.

The problem is that gaming publications are far too entwined with their advertisers. I don’t know when exactly everything went off track, but at some point they sold their soul to the marketers. At this point it’s a lot like lobbyists and the government, which isn’t something any industry should aspire to become.

How do other industries do it? Book reviews, movie reviews, automobile reviews, whatever kind of review? For the most part diversification seems to be the key. You don’t tie keeping your lights on with the people trying to sell the product you’re covering.

Maybe this fiasco will start getting people to reevaluate how their revenue models work. This could be a turning point, one for the better. And if not, well, there are a blogs springing up every day dedicated to gaming. Blogs freed from worrying about who’s going to sponsor their bandwidth this month.

In a time when everyone is a critic is losing your reputation over some banner ads really worth it?