From the Industry: “Game Journalists”

Below came from a former “game journalist”:

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Here’s some other ‘inside’ info on how game reviews work:

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*As your correspondent noted, flying ‘journalists’ out to incredibly swanky hotels, putting them up for days and treating them to all manner of free entertainment (read: booze, shows, skiing, etc.–and even one gent on my mag had the head of a developer offer to get him a (very expensive) prostitute!) is a routine occurrence in teh game ‘journalism’ biz. So for anyone that is living under the apprehension or delusion that this IW deal for MW2 was a one-off situation, please realize that this stuff happens so often as to be run-of-the-mill. (You can connect the dots yourself and decide whether it has any impact on reviews, but we had someone specifically in this role and he didn’t review games so that we could at least have some sort of plausible deniability for this sort of thing but most mags/websites at the time sent their reviewers.)

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*Something else that is routinely ignored: generally speaking, once a game journalist starts reviewing games from a particular company he can either request (or is automatically put on) a comp list. This just means that the ‘journalist’ in question will now receive the entire library of games, going forward, that that publisher puts out free of charge. You can decide for yourself if thousands of dollars in free software over a ‘journalists’ life might, in some way, lead to coloring of reviews. (This is 100% routine and, in many cases, the ‘journalist’ in question would have to request to be taken off the list–guess how often that happens.)

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*Both of these events kind of breed a small conflict of interest (duh) but what makes it worse is that, quite often, the ‘journalists’ in question are also friends w/ the people developing the games. (Again, this is why we had someone specifically in this role so as to minimize such conflicts.) Now ask yourself: if you are buddy-buddy w/ the develoopers (and how do you think they get the ‘scoops’ they get in many cases? It’s not like they’re performing Mission Impossible-style incursions into the wild to snare them), you AIM them or email them or Skype w/ them every day whether or not that might also compromise your (suppose) objectivity. The most infamous example of this is when Matt Cassamasina (sp?) of IGN married the head of Nintendo’s PR effort and IGN let him stay as head of the Nintendo Channel on IGN for years after the fact, clearly unperturbed at the massive, earth-shattering, conflict of interest inherent in such a relationship. (And let’s not kid ourselves: how do guys behave for women when they’re trying to win them over? Exactly.)

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So, yeah, the game journalist biz is laughable and every time you hear one of them utter the phrase ‘game journalist’ just close the browser window, go over to GameFAQs or Amazon.com and read their reviews instead–at least the sheer number will give you a better idea of what a game is about, mostly w/o what passes for ‘clever’ (read snarky and insulting) writing amongst the Gen Y clowns manning most of these mags/sites.