Totally Not Corrupt Professional Objective Gaming Journalism DRAMA

[Infinitron]

Editorial on Joystiq's MMO subsite: http://massively.joystiq.com/2015/01/30/massively-that-was/

I have sad news for the Massively staff and community today, news most of you already knew was coming.

This week, we learned our AOL overlords have decided that they no longer wish to be in the enthusiast blog business and are shutting all of them down. This mass-sunset includes decade-old gaming journalism icon Joystiq, and therefore, it includes us. February 3rd, 2015, will be the final day of operation for Massively-that-was.

I would like to be able to tell you truthfully that this is an equitable and just decision that makes some sort of logical sense, but the reality is that our overlords' decisions have always been unfathomable. I know more of what I know about corporate from reading tech and finance news than through my own job. We all suspected this was coming eventually a year ago when a VP whose name I don't even know and who never read our site chose to reward our staggering, hard-won 40% year-over-year page view growth by... hacking our budget in half. There's nothing to do in the face of that kind of logic but throw your hands in the air. It's not about merit or lack thereof, and it's not about journalism or gaming being dead or anything grand like that, so there's no point in taking it personally.

But for me, it's hard not to. This was a lot more than a job for me. I've worked as a lead editor at Massively for just shy of five years, half of that as its boss, and it seeped into my life and became more than a full-time job, even though none of us ever received any benefits. You know that two-week "maternity leave" I took last year when my daughter was born? That was my vacation for the whole year. And I wasn't alone in that foolishness/dedication; the Massively writers, past and present, bent over backward for the site. I flat out love these guys. I came in here as a geeky copyeditor and am leaving with a fleet of good friends and a much deeper understanding of how and why my favorite genre runs the way it does, and it will forever influence how I play games and whose games I buy.

Massively's writers are second to none in the MMO genre; I'll so dearly miss the day-to-day, down-in-the-trenches collaboration with my team. People actually cared about this place. In a year when other sites were finally discovering ethics, we wondered what took them so long because our network already had a transparent ethics policy. We already didn't play dirty pool. You might not have agreed with all of our opinions -- I didn't always agree with our opinions! -- but our hands were clean, and you can't say that about a lot of sites in this industry. Some sites out there actually employ industry PR as fan writers, out in the open, like it's no big thing.

That's your industry now.

We tried to rise above it.

Our whole network did.


Thank you, PA.

Massively's community deserves its kudos too. We had some trolls and some people who made me tear my hair out, but we also had a core of whip-smart regulars who sparked lively, thoughtful debate and inspired us to write more and better. I love our community, and I proved it by hiring several writers straight out of the comment section. I'm really going to miss being challenged to think harder and type faster by you. Where do I go to learn now? Even if I were still just a player, even if I had never worked here, I would be deeply troubled by the vanishing of a site like Massively. It's just not fair, but it's happening anyway.

I would like to thank each and every one of you who sent your condolences and best wishes and #savemassively tweets to us and kept #savejoystiq trending all Tuesday as the rumors began to leak out.There's even a petition, for skies' sake. I am sorry we couldn't overtly confirm it then, but I'm pretty sure most of you reading have been around long enough to understand why. We've spent a lot of this week linking those comments to each other to keep our spirits up. Heck, some of our harshest critics and even devs we've written about unflatteringly nevertheless rallied around us, and we're grateful and touched. Really, thank you. You're genuinely classy in an industry that too frequently isn't. But then I always knew that MMO players were a special breed of gamer. It's why I've stuck by this genre for over 17 years. Community may be degrading inside of MMOs, but outside of them, nope -- I see community every day.

I want to thank my team for standing by me through this brutal and exhausting last year in particular. Jef, who never put up with bullshit and always put the site first. Justin, who never complained and always did so much more than he had to. Eliot, with whom I spent so many mornings arguing just to argue. MJ, whose enthusiasm reminds me games are supposed to be fun. Toli, whose articles make me wish I could write half as well as he. Brendan, whose longevity is surpassed only by his talent and expertise in so many subjects. Larry, who wore any hat I asked him to and always found the inside scoops. And Mike, a consummate professional who for some reason willingly came back to write for me even after I had to lay him off once already. That is how much people love this place.

I would also like to thank my boss at Joystiq, Ludwig Kietzmann. He demonstrated tremendous faith in me to run Massively as a unique outlet in the industry. He insulated us from so much corporate ick, creating a writing-first environment that few internet editors ever experience. He kept us online last year when he could have cut us loose. And he treated the MMO genre with respect, which is nearly unheard of on mainstream gaming sites. /salute, Luddy

Many of you have asked us what's next. As we've been alluding, we are considering striking out as a team on a site that isn't beholden to indifferent corporate overlords. Those of you who are begging us to crowdfund might get a chance to put your money where your mouths are and help shape that idea. We'll be releasing more information over the next few weeks as we formulate our plans and will be using our social media feeds to communicate when we're ready. If we go forward, we hope you'll join us.

In the meantime, I invite you to follow our writers and share your own Twitter handles in the comments so we can follow you right back. (I mean it: There are some posters here I really don't want to lose track of.)

Bree Royce (@nbrianna, blog)
Jef Reahard (@jefreahard)
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog)
Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog)
MJ Guthrie (@MJ_Guthrie, blog)
Mike Foster (@MikedotFoster, blog)
Anatoli Ingram (@ceruleangrey)
Brendan Drain (@nyphur)
Larry Everett (@Shaddoe, blog)

The site, I'm told, will be archived and kept online, at least for a while. We're here until the lights go out on Tuesday. When you can't run, you crawl, and when you can't crawl... well, you know how it goes.

-Bree

 

[Kem0sabe]

Never happy when people loose their jobs, but scratch off another one from the gaming "journalism" site list. The collapse of gaming media cant come soon enough.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-10-eurogamer-has-dropped-review-scores

Eurogamer has dropped review scores
New policy also puts matching the user experience first.

Starting today with our review of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D, Eurogamer is making the biggest change we've ever made to the way we review games. From now on, we will no longer be scoring games out of ten.

In place of scores, we'll have one-line summaries for every review, and a new recommendation system whereby some, but not all games will be consideredRecommended, Essential or Avoid. As a result of these changes, we will no longer be listed on the review-aggregation site Metacritic.

We are also changing (or firming up) other areas of our reviews policy, with the intention of ensuring that we always review the same experience that you get when you buy a game. This means that we will only review from final retail versions and online games will be reviewed after they've launched.

So, why are we doing this? How does it work? What does it mean? Read on to find out. (There'll be an opportunity to ask me more about this change in a live question and answer session here on Eurogamer later today.)


Games are changing - so reviews should too
Since Eurogamer launched 15 years ago, the way video games are made and distributed has changed almost beyond recognition. In the last few years in particular, the rise of digital distribution and the assumption that most consoles and all computers are connected to the internet has resulted in much more fluid game development. Some games evolve right up to the moment of their commercial release, with a day one update. Some games are released commercially long before they are finished, via 'early access' versions. Some games never stop evolving.

The vast increase in popularity of online gaming has also changed our expectations, changed the designs of many types of game, introduced new technical challenges and increased the interaction between games and their audiences. You can argue that games with strong social multiplayer elements don't meaningfully exist - and can't be properly tested or understood - until they're being played by a fully-sized audience.

All of this has made the job of reviewing games much more unpredictable and complex. It has led to wildly varying review circumstances which challenge our ability to apply best practice. It has introduced new subtleties and variables to game performance and design which we need to assess.

At Eurogamer, we relish challenges like this, and we've worked hard to stay ahead of the situation. But we have recently felt that our review policy and format was making staying consistent and providing you with useful context harder than it should be. We needed to fix that.

We reached these conclusions and made a decision to drop scores and update our policy late last year. (It's interesting to note that our peers at the now sadly defunct US site Joystiq arrived at a very similar decision at around the same time, and for very similar reasons.)

Review scores don't work any more
This hasn't been the first time we've discussed dropping review scores. In the past, the case we've made for it internally has always been that a number is a very reductive way to represent a nuanced, subjective opinion, and that the arguments started by scores aren't productive. The counter-argument was simple but powerful: as an at-a-glance guide to what we think, scores were very useful to readers.

We no longer think that's true. In the present environment, scores are struggling to encompass the issues that are most important to you. How should we score an excellent game with severe networking issues? A flawlessly polished game with a hackneyed design? A brilliantly tuned multiplayer experience with dreadful storytelling? If you expect the score to encompass every aspect of a game, the task becomes an exercise in futility. Add an inflated understanding of the scoring scale in many quarters - whereby 7/10 and even sometimes 8/10 are construed as disappointing scores - and you have a recipe for mixed messages.

Scores are failing us, they're failing you, and perhaps most importantly, they are failing to fairly represent the games themselves.

Our new recommendation system
The first and most important component of our new system is a punchy summary that will appear at the top of every review (so you don't have to scroll all the way down and back up again any more). This will give you the headline: a strong indication of how we feel about a game and what is most noteworthy about it. It will be short, about the length of a tweet - but when it comes to getting our message across, 140 characters is still a big advance on one number.

Beyond this, we still wanted a way to highlight the games that we feel most strongly about. So, some - but once again, not all - games will be flagged as Recommended, Essential orAvoid.

• Recommended games are just that. They're the games we really want to bring to your attention, maybe even give you a friendly shove towards. They're the games that we find most interesting, most exciting, most fun. Broadly, they're games that would have been scored at the high end of the old scale - but we're going to use Recommended in a different, more flexible way. For example, a flawed game that we love for its originality and creativity might be Recommended, while a technically accomplished but derivative game might not be.

• Essential games are the best of the best. They're games that thrill us to the core, that get to the heart of what video gaming can and should be. We only expect to see a handful of Essential games every year.

• Avoid rests at the opposite end of the spectrum. Again, we expect to use this pretty rarely. It's not so much for games that aren't to our taste as games that have serious flaws in design, technology or concept - flaws that make them impossible to recommend spending hard-earned money or precious time on. It's for games that are broken or just straight-up terrible.

• So what about games that carry no recommendation? This will cover a pretty broad spectrum of quality, but typically they'll be games with some qualities to recommend them but about which we have important reservations. This is where you'd find, for example, a sports game that provides no meaningful advance on last year's model, or an indie game with beautiful artwork but irritating design, or a well-made action-adventure with a dull storyline and samey gameplay. In these cases, the summary line should let you know whether you're interested to read more.

We've recommended some games already

To give you an idea of how the system works, and to populate the site with useful lists of recommended games, we've gone over every review as far back as 1st January 2014 and flagged our favourite games as Recommended and Essential. (Their scores still stand, and we were guided by the original review in our choices.)

In addition, we've gone back a bit further on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Wii U to cover all reviews since the launches of these machines, including ports of even earlier releases such as Spelunky. That makes for pretty definitive lists of recommended games for the current three home consoles.

You can peruse these in our newRecommended Games index, where you can filter by platform, or for Essential games only. We think it's a pretty useful new feature for the site, and fun to browse.

What this means for Metacritic (and Google)
From now on, Eurogamer reviews will no longer be listed on Metacritic. We just don't think there's a fair way to interpret our new system in Metacritic's 100-point scale. We don't want to do it ourselves and we don't want Metacritic doing it for us. For many game creators, far too much is riding on a Metascore - good or bad - for us to allow it to be influenced by a rating that we don't think represents us fairly, or that we don't have full control over.

Over the years, we've come to believe that the influence of Metacritic on the games industry is not a healthy one (and we're not alone in this opinion in the industry, either). This is not the fault of Metacritic itself or the people who made it, who just set out to create a useful resource for readers. It's a problem caused by the over-importance attached to Metascores by certain sectors of the games business and audience - Metascores which are, let's remember, averages of dozens of numerical values, ascribed more or less arbitrarily, in different systems, by a wide range of reviewers expressing a wide range of opinions. The result has been conservatism in mainstream game design and a stifling of variety in critical voices. In short: it's meant less interesting and innovative games.

So we felt it was the right thing to do to stop feeding this system. It's not the reason we decided to drop scores, but it is an important benefit of the move.

When searching for reviews in Google, however, you will still see star ratings attached to Eurogamer reviews: five stars for Essential, four for Recommended, one for Avoid, three for everything else. Google is a very important source of traffic for us, and it's vital that our reviews are made easy to find by being as featured as prominently as possible. The star ratings help a great deal with this, and we feel that the scheme I've just described is a pretty close match for our system that won't misrepresent our reviews. That said, it's important they are not misinterpreted as us sneaking a numerical score out there by stealth. If you see three stars against our review on Google, that means the game belongs to a broad middle band of quality - not that it secretly got 6/10.

We will only review online games after launch...
Too often in the last few years, we've found that the game we review does not resemble the experience gamers have when it launches. (Perhaps you can guess which games I am talking about.) From now on, making every attempt to match your experience will be of paramount importance in all our reviewing.

It has been our policy for a while that we only review games that require an internet connection - games such as Destiny - after launch. We're now extending this policy to cover all predominantly online games. What we mean by that is games where we believe online play is of critical importance to the majority of players. (So, Call of Duty would qualify, but Assassin's Creed probably wouldn't.) We're doing this because we don't think it's possible to properly test networking technology or assess long-term multiplayer game design without a full player population.

...But we will give early impressions on day one or before
We understand your need to make informed buying decisions at launch, so when we delay the review of an online game, we will always seek to publish an early opinion on it. This article won't be called a review; it won't be comprehensive or represent our final word on the game. It will, however, offer you useful information and a robust opinion based on a solid amount of gameplay.

These articles will appear on the day of the game's launch - perhaps the day after if there is zero prior access - or on the review embargo set by the publisher, and they will be based on whatever access we've been able to obtain. The full review will then follow when we're ready - that will vary by game, but typically it will be after around a week's play. We've already tried this approach on games like Destiny, The Crew and Elite: Dangerous, and we think it works well. We also published early impressions of Evolve yesterday and will follow up with a full review early next week.

We will only review retail versions of games
Even single-player games are developed right up until the last moment these days, so it's still very important in these cases that we try to review the game as it will be when you buy it. For console games, this means that we will no longer review from pre-release "debug code", but only from a version that will play on a regular retail machine.

In practice, this rules out all publisher-hosted review events for Eurogamer reviews. (Our ethics policy previously allowed us to attend these if we paid our own travel and accommodation costs.) We may still attend these events or use debug code for the purposes of other coverage - to make videos or get hands-on impressions, for example - but it will never be the basis of our final review.

We will avoid updating reviews
Regularly updated reviews might seem like the answer to changing circumstances (and changing games), but we don't believe they're helpful to readers. So we will avoid updating our reviews unless there are extraordinary circumstances. We will always seek to publish the most authoritative review we can to begin with - delaying it if need be - and include reasonable assumptions about the future development of the game in our assessment. If a game changes radically enough over time, we're more likely to consider a full re-review than an update.

Farewell, old friend.

We hope you understand where we're coming from with these changes and can get behind them. At Eurogamer, we're passionate about reviews. We work hard on them and we're always thinking hard about how to make them better. As editor, they're very close to my heart - I was the site's reviews editor for years, and consider myself a critic first and foremost - so that's not going to change any time soon. We think the role video game reviews fulfil is changing, but if reviews change to reflect that, they won't lose any relevance or importance. Quite the opposite.

And for our long-term readers... from now on, you'll never be able to say that anything is better than Halo.

 

[Kem0sabe]

This coming right after their gloriously ridiculous 10/10 Sunless Sea review.

 

[Perkel]

still it is good change. Review scored are the most shitty thing happened to game industry overall.
Imagine getting paid based not on your game sales but on fucking reviews scores.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'm not the only one who thinks: "Oh, did they piss off the publishers so much that they can't get free review copies anymore?"

Their new rating system looks promising, but only 4 grades (of which one is unnamed) isn't exactly gonna do much.

They probably used the opportunity to raise their bribe rate for top score reviews.

 

[felipepepe]

Now all AAA games will be:

Instead of 10/10.

PROGRESS

 

[Cadmus]

Now all AAA games will be:

Instead of 10/10.

PROGRESS

I uhm.... yeah.
It still is kind of a progress, too bad their reviews can't be trusted on the basis that they suck at playing the games and doing their research. I won't be reading their shit anyway.

 

[Havoc]

Yeah. The less Metacritic has power, the better.

 

[Jarpie]

I'm not the only one who thinks: "Oh, did they piss off the publishers so much that they can't get free review copies anymore?"

Their new rating system looks promising, but only 4 grades (of which one is unnamed) isn't exactly gonna do much.

They probably used the opportunity to raise their bribe rate for top score reviews.

Yeah, I'm thinking the same that they will piss off publishers and won't get as many review copies anymore, or they have already pissed off enough of them so it doesn't matter if they abandon the scores.

 

[Snorkack]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-10-eurogamer-has-dropped-review-scores

Review scores don't work any more

They never worked.

Good change. Eurogamer still gonna be shit, tho.

 

[Melan]

So, it is about ethics in game journalism after all.

 

[Archibald]

Yeah. The less Metacritic has power, the better.

Not being listed on Metacritics is only good thing from this "progress". Thou I will not be surprised if at some point they'll figure out some kewl formula that somehow translates their seal of approval into 100/100/GOTY.

Either way scores or this essential crap, its same thing. Only difference is that angry fanboys won't bombard them with questions on why newest Halo X was rated 97/100 while newest GTA was at 98/100.

 

[Astral Rag]

Eurogamer has dropped review scores

 

[LESS T_T]

Eurogamer has dropped review scores

From now on, Eurogamer reviews will no longer be listed on Metacritic. We just don't think there's a fair way to interpret our new system in Metacritic's 100-point scale. We don't want to do it ourselves and we don't want Metacritic doing it for us. For many game creators, far too much is riding on a Metascore - good or bad - for us to allow it to be influenced by a rating that we don't think represents us fairly, or that we don't have full control over.

Over the years, we've come to believe that the influence of Metacritic on the games industry is not a healthy one (and we're not alone in this opinion in the industry, either). This is not the fault of Metacritic itself or the people who made it, who just set out to create a useful resource for readers. It's a problem caused by the over-importance attached to Metascores by certain sectors of the games business and audience - Metascores which are, let's remember, averages of dozens of numerical values, ascribed more or less arbitrarily, in different systems, by a wide range of reviewers expressing a wide range of opinions. The result has been conservatism in mainstream game design and a stifling of variety in critical voices. In short: it's meant less interesting and innovative games.

So we felt it was the right thing to do to stop feeding this system. It's not the reason we decided to drop scores, but it is an important benefit of the move.

Yeah! Die out, Metacritic!

 

[Caim]

So they're going with Essential, Recommended and Avoid.

What, no , "wait until it's cheaper/complete with all DLC", "for fans of the genre, but not for new players" or "so bad it has to be seen to believe"?

 

[balmorar]

Scoreless reviews were always useless for me. So eurogamer is now useless. Site will probably be closed next year.

 

[Thane Solus]

Scoreless reviews were always useless for me. So eurogamer is now useless. Site will probably be closed next year.

So you need somebody to show you a score for a game, instead of reading the article/watching the video and make your own impression based on what is related by the author?



These days, its enough to watch a let's play, and you will get a better insight into a game than any review, no matter how retarded and clueless these let's players are.

Dont tell me, you play a lot on consoles... and Bioware is the best company eva?

 

[A horse of course]

Kotaku already has a "Yes/No" review system and their reviews are still garbage. This will, at best, slightly reduce publisher pressure on reviewers due to the necessity of getting an 8.5 instead of an 8.4 or whatever.

 

[Decado]

All of this was bound to happen. These magazines are being cut out of the hype-generation process, which was the only way they were able to pay the bills in the first place. So they need to re-position themselves, and inserting themselves into the culture critic line of work is the next best logical step. What is a game journalism organization without pre-release copies or review scores? They are an opinionated blogger.

The Massively article was so fucking sad to read. I will never understand people willing to work in such shitty conditions. No vacation time? No benefits? The reason the game journalism industry is in the state that it is in is because too many naive idiots with no self-worth are willing to work such thankless fucking jobs just because said job is "in the game industry!!" The only people who benefit from that kind of insane devotion are corporate overlords. And frankly, if they were doing something that was truly valuable with a truly distinct audience (and I'm not saying these things aren't true), they could be doing what they're doing without being funded by some other group. I hope they make the attempt, because at least then they will know.

 

[Kem0sabe]

The reverse coin is that now all the info is centralized on these obnoxious youtube personalities, who think themselves gods gift to gaming culture.

Guys like TB, Angry Joe and whatnot must be insufferable in person.

 

[pippin]

I've always seen reviews as pointless, though. Even back in the day, they were hit or miss. I remember a review for Age of Empires 2 where the guy who wrote it was very dismissive of the game, seeing it as a clone of the objectively superior game, Command and Conquer. He spent 3 physical pages doing that. In the end you had one final paragraph where the guy goes like "uh, I guess it has nice production values and better pathfinding". Final score: 85/100.

 

[Decado]

The reverse coin is that now all the info is centralized on these obnoxious youtube personalities, who think themselves gods gift to gaming culture.

Sure but at the end of the day, you can turn off the goddamn volume. It really is that simple. I get what you're saying, but a single LP is worth 1000 words of some bloviating review, don't you agree? Turn off the sound and watch 20 minutes of game footage, and I think most people would feel better equipped to make a decision than after reading 10 annoying "articles" on VG journalism websites.

 

[GrainWetski]

The reverse coin is that now all the info is centralized on these obnoxious youtube personalities, who think themselves gods gift to gaming culture.

Guys like TB, Angry Joe and whatnot must be insufferable in person.

Unedited gameplay is much preferable to marketing speak from gamejournos. AngryJoe is just a gamejourno(go watch his Dragon Age 2 and Risen 3 videos) on Youtube, so yeah, nobody should watch him.

Although, at times even gameplay can be really misleading about a game if the person playing is fucking awful. Giantbomb's Bound By Flame Quick Look is a great example of that.

 

[AN4RCHID]

The best part of this is that their reviews are no longer going to impact developers through MC score. They can nag about Bayonetta's tits all day for all I care, as long as it isn't hurting the devs financially. I didn't read their shitty reviews before and I'm not going to start now, but this is still a win.