Interview Thoughts on game journalism

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Tags: Larian Studios; Swen Vincke

Larian's Swen Vincke gave an interview to NeoSeeker on how Gaming Journalism is broken.

I feel like that's a misconception, though. Maybe you know things I don't, but, as I've usually understood it, the advertising and the public relations (PR) teams are generally very separate and have little or no influence over each other. We've never had that problem; it's never been brought up. I mean, we're not a massive site, but I think we're big enough we would've seen that by now, because we deal with a lot of big publishers.

More often it's an issue where the writer isn't as critical as they should be, but it's more down to them and PR. It doesn't even have to be a spoken thing, they just don't want to upset PR for whatever reason.

In general it's not that outspoken. Sometimes it is; I've seen examples of it. But it's probably not the norm. Although, and I'm not going to mention the magazine (it's a fairly big one), not sooner than I'd just done an interview with somebody [recently] was the advertising manager talking with us on the phone a couple of hours later about how many pages we'd wanted to buy, etc. So it does happen like that.

Public relations is all about creating the perception around a game, which does cause problems. You see situations where the guys going to review a game are invited to go to Venice, and they're going to spend a half hour with the game and a week in Venice in a five-star hotel. It's going to be extremely hard to be extremely negative about it.

I've seen a PR manager in action for one of my games make a 79 an 81. And it cost him a lot of money; it cost him full page ads over multiple titles, but he managed to, and it had a big impact on the sales of the game.

Scoring is an issue in itself. As an editor, personally, I hate scoring. For awhile we didn't score our games; we brought it in eventually. I understand the need of it, and why it's useful, but it causes so many problems, with readers and PR. Idealistically I would like to eliminate scoring but that's not happening.

It's insane it can have such an impact. I was comparing numbers for Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga and Dragon Age II, because it had the same Metacritic rating (82). I went to look at the user scores for both games, and Dragon Age II had 73% user score on GameSpot, 70 on Amazon, and 42 on Metacritic, over thousands of votes. In our case it was much higher; our Metacritic fits more with our user score: 85 on GameSpot, 84 on Metacritic, 90 on Amazon. I know it's because it's purely PR machine work.

And if you look at the trends you see the initial Dragon Age II reviews were very high, and as you go over time...

Afterwards Swen followed up on the interview with a few more thoughts on his blog.

Games journalism obviously is a sensitive topic for a game developer because it’s like a girlfriend asking – do you think there’s something wrong with how I cook? If you’re honest you’re doomed, if not, you can look forward to things like oversalted steak for the rest of your life

Before delving into this, I ‘d like to say that the best thing players can to do when it comes to judging which game they should buy, is to find reviewers that like the games they like, and stay aways as far as they can from sites like Metacritic. I say this because the list of factors that can affect a review is enormous.

First off, you should be extremely wary about day 1 reviews – the probability that something stinks about those reviews is rather high. Just go to metacritic if you’re into the scoring game, look at the critic scores and then look at user scores. Also look at the quantity of reviews on metacritic and check out the dates of the review. For bad games with initially high metacritic ratings, you’ll see a pattern emerging.

 

[Excidium]

P. cool.

 

[Shannow]

Swen is turning more and more into a bro
But for all Sean's pride in his own editing skills and quality control, the article has a hideous format and could have done with a lot more editing...

 

[DwarvenFood]

PRO-TIP: The blog is way more interesting than the interview itself

 

[Brother None]

I'm so glad we cut out scoring for GameBanshee. Had developers thank/compliment us for it, too. If only we could cut out all scores from all reviews worldwide for a while, just to see what it'd do. Or better yet, nuke that cancerous leech that is Metacritic.

 

[Mastermind]

Never seen so much butthurt in one interview for quite some time. Even if he's right, he comes off like a whiny bitch.

 

[hoverdog]

and here I hoped mastermind was gone forever

however, it seems getting rid of liberal and andhaira exhausted codex's miracle limit

 

[Kz3r0]

The troll is back, thank you for sparing me the hassle to find your profile for putting you in ignore.

 

[Grimlorn]

If anything this also shows why shitty reviewers rise to the top. Triple A developers are going to seek out the fanboy reviewers who aren't objective and keep on eating their shit and they will get all the interviews as opposed to anyone that might give a fair and critical interview. If they don't get that reviewer to review their game, they won't send them an early copy to review and the website/magazine suffers.

Yeah the scoring system sucks. I'd prefer an average/mediocre game get a 5 instead of a 8 to 8.5. Doesn't give a lot of room to score something better. Perhaps it would be interesting to see what would happen if the scoring system was removed, but you'd still have the same problem of buying reviewers to give positive reviews. Now that I think about it game companies would just start quoting reviewers and sticking their names on their boxes. Eventually, some (the popular ones who are always used) names would become popular and consumers would just use them instead of IGN or Gamespot.

He does come off a little whiny talking about getting a bad first score and people working 16 hour days. I'm sure Bioware's employees were working 16 hour days and they still put out the piece of shit that was DA2. But I'd probably be pissed too if I worked that hard and the game was bad. Kind of hard to be objective. Definitely a double edged sword, but the edge with game companies abusing the system is sharper than a couple bad reviews slipping through because of interns or someone who doesn't know anything about reviewing a game.

 

[hiver]

The truth is that it should not be called Journalism at all.
Its hype dispensary.
An extension of PR machine.

The label "journalist" or "journalism" can be applied to a very, very, count them on one hand, number of people and sites and even that is somewhat stretching it a bit, defused only by the fact that the whole journalism took a shit dive, viewing globally and generally.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I'm so glad we cut out scoring for GameBanshee. Had developers thank/compliment us for it, too. If only we could cut out all scores from all reviews worldwide for a while, just to see what it'd do. Or better yet, nuke that cancerous leech that is Metacritic.

Metacritic mostly works fine for other media though. I don't like it any more than you do, but the problem definitely lies with the industry here.

 

[Brother None]

Even for other industries, I don't like that Metacritic is a closed-off concept, where they select what media is "worthy" and then attribute a completely subjective "weight" to the importance of the outlet. That's a pretty pathetic system.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

It is pathetic and arbitrary. However, it makes the problem with game journalism more readily apparent. It's very easy to simply calculate the percentage of works allotted a score of over 80 in every industry, and point out that it's suspiciously high for games. So, in a sense, metacritic itself not only proves that game journalism sucks, but also its own irrelevance.

 

[Country_Gravy]

I think that gaming journalists are the pinnacle of journalistic integrity.

 

[Shannow]

Dunno about print in other countries, but German papers already mostly consist of PR pieces and regurgitated agency news. Gaming "journalists" fit quite well with real "journalists" as far as I'm concerned.

 

[LibertyRansom]

Video Game journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

 

[Kz3r0]

Video Game journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

I thought that was football.

 

[visions]

Video Game journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

I thought that was football.

 

[felipepepe]

Video Game journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

for the Zappa quote.

 

[Average Manatee]

Lots of lulz already in this thread

I don't see how an ingenue game studio can expect a huge amount of coverage on a game in a relatively obscure game genre. It's a bit of a chicken and egg dilemma. Are games crappy because of journalism or journalism because of games? Most games are a certain way, that we don't like, and only people who do like that kind of stuff are likely to become game journalists.

Reviewers (I refuse to call them journalists) not spending a week long vacation to review a game they spend half an hour playing would be a good start.

 

[Mangoose]

Dunno about print in other countries, but German papers already mostly consist of PR pieces and regurgitated agency news. Gaming "journalists" fit quite well with real "journalists" as far as I'm concerned.

Incidentally, American gaming 'journalists' seem much more bought-off than the European ones.

 

[curry]

I think that gaming journalists are the pinnacle of journalistic integrity.

There's a saying that the first casualty of journalism is truth

 

[Mozgoëbstvo]

The hype, yes. It's palpable. Just go into the first, short gameplay preview of any AAA health regen FPS or AAA third person ARPG on gamespot.
See the future reviewers play for a minute, by instinct, what they have already played 1000 times in a different skin; see them saying "yeah, that's pretty cool" for every minor distinguishing
feature the developer lapdog points out during the preview (see? Our game has a revolutionary THREE weapon system! Two is so passée).
See said game take a score ranging from 8 to 9.5 weeks later.

 

[nihil]

...that cancerous leech that is Metacritic.

It's useful for finding reviews of semi-old games, though. I never use the metascore, but I regularly look at a few of the least favorable reviews for a game, read some of the motivations the reviewers had for giving the score they gave, and decide whether I might like the game.

But yeah, it brings more bad to the table than good.

Oh, and on topic: really interesting stuff.

 

[Volourn]

The butthurt is strong in this one.