I ultimately don’t think he’s a bad guy so I’m rooting for him to show us wrong.
I think he always just believed in his vision too much and didn’t realise that he and his team couldn’t end up delivering on it. And then he’d be so excited about what he’s working on that he just couldn’t not share it with others. I don’t think he ever intended to mislead.
I know there’s the milo thing but with that I feel like he still thought they could do it in the end but Microsoft just needed something right there and then to show. I think that issue ends up more squarely on whoever sold him on what the hardware could do and he had not yet fully hit those walls of limitations enough to realise they weren’t coming down at all. (I also think this goes for Sean Murray too when he did the talk show circuit that Sony put him on - although without the hardware stuff and more on whether or not they could deliver on time since they’ve shown what they wanted was actually possible with future updates)
I’m taking the bait again for old times sake if nothing else. I hope he proves everyone wrong, it will be a fantastic end to his saga, and we’ll get something great.
When we’re let down again, we’ll still have something fun to play with and getting tricked by Molyneuxs big ideas will be like opening a time capsule from a more civilised age.
Um, that’s how it always should have been. That’s how journalism in general works, going back since pretty much the dawn of newspapers: readers pay for copy, and advertisements subsidize it.
Like the games industry, publications that cover video games have been rocked by a turbulent market since the highs of the COVID-19 pandemic. Media owners like IGN, Fandom, Gamer Network, and Valent have all cut jobs in the past year.
Is it turbulent though? This article goes over video game spending by year, and it has largely plateaued since 2019. There was a pretty big jump in 2020 due to the pandemic, but the market seems to have returned to a normalish trajectory and mobile revenue seems to be plateauing (I guess it’s saturated?).
I think what happened is that people are shifting where they get their information from. Instead of relying on game journalists, who seem to be paid by game devs (hence why any big game rarely gets below 7/10), they rely on social media, who theoretically aren’t paid by game devs (there’s plenty of astroturfing though). The business model where they’re not paid by game devs should always have been the case, since when people are deciding what games to buy, they clearly would prefer a less biased source.
IMO, games journalism should have multiple revenue streams, such as:
fan revenue - either donations or subscriptions should always be primary
curated game bundles, like Jingle Jam - run a charity event where a large portion is donated (be up-front, and have a slider so donators can decide how much goes where, even 0% to one or the other)
merch
game tournaments w/ prizes - would be especially cool to focus on indies
maybe have paid questions from fans that gets answered in a podcast or a paid video to discuss topics of fans’ choosing
They can get very far before needing to run ads. Produce quality journalism and have some additional revenue streams and it’ll work out.
I don’t consume much gaming journalism because it’s largely BS that praises big AAAs and generally ignores indies unless they get viral. I want honest opinions about games, not some balance between sucking up to who pays the bills and mild criticism.
Games media worked under an ad-supported model for about 20 years though. As those in that business will tell you, the payouts from advertisers have fallen dramatically. The ones keeping themselves afloat now have pivoted to your first, third, and fifth bullet points, as well as ads on the free content that subscribers typically get to opt out of.
But 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 legally 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.
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.
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.
Reviews will typically mention which version they were, but in general, there are very few differences between them these days, unlike back in the 6th gen or early 7th gen. Games like Cyberpunk are outliers.
Starfield is not a bad game. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good one. My biggest complaints with it, personally, are all the ways that it should have been modernized but refused to, falling back on what worked over a decade before it came out without turning an eye toward its contemporaries and the improvements they’ve made to the same formula. I find Steam reviews to be a valuable data point among plenty of other data points, but user reviews being that much lower than the critic average doesn’t mean the critic score is a problem.
For an example of a game where critics reviewed it less favorably than the user score, see Mad Max or Days Gone, which might be explained as games where the initial sales weren’t strong, and people who found it later, often at a discounted price, were pleasantly surprised compared to its reputation. There’s also the likes of SkillUp’s review of Ghost of Yotei. That game has largely reviewed very well by other outlets, but he found his review to be out of sync with his audience. If you’re a reviewer who plays dozens of games per year, your opinion of a formulaic open world game might be very different from someone who plays 3 games per year and hasn’t gotten sick of it. Both are valid points of view.
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:
Publishers know which outlets review their games well, and they prioritize giving advance copies to those outlets and not others; this is why you’ll see the average score drop by a few points after the game’s official release.
The person on staff who liked the last game in the series, or other games in the same genre, tends to keep reviewing them, because they enjoy the work more, and that review better serves the overall audience. This can explain why a genre-defying game like Death Stranding reviews in the low 80s, but then the sequel is reviewed by people who tended to appreciate the first game, and the sequel reviews higher.
Publishers know which version of their game is best, and they’ll send review copies of that version. That means they send the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 when the console version is broken, and they send the console version when the PC optimization sucks.
When a game is online-only, publishers like to host on-site, curated review sessions with optimal network conditions in a space where all the reviewers definitely have someone to play with. Review outlets have become skeptical of reviewing games this way, and you’ll more often see “reviews in progress” of games where they want the servers to “settle” first. I was surprised to see MS Flight Simulator 2024 actually held to account over its broken online infrastructure, as you’re correct that, historically, they’re not held accountable, but that’s because of this change that review outlets have made in how they cover games like this.
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.
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.
That website has so much ragebait and I’ve never noticed it to ever have been anything better than that since I first started seeing articles from them. Once I noticed I stopped. Like 15-18 years ago I would read Kotaku but at some point it became click bait and weirdly gooner bait for a while so I stopped with that site 15-18 years ago. Like the site started good but then became the worst kind of geekdom pandering. Like Perez Hilton for fictional characters
It happens to every gaming site. Some worse than others. Gamespot post-Kane and Lynch and IGN at some point became a shameless industry advertising site. Polygon started real good and quickly devolved into a terrible ratio of clickbait to occasional good article. At this point the only games media I care for are official communications and gameplay videos from randoms on YouTube or twitch where the only narration I care to hear is about bugs and performance. Gameplay can show itself in video. I can judge writing myself
TheGamer came out of nowhere too. Back when I used faceboook almost a decade ago, I used to follow a gaming meme page. They post typical gaming shitposts of that era. They had massive followers, and big engagements.
Then one day every shitpost they post is branded with TheGamer logo, the page renamed to TheGamer. I don’t remember the original page name but it gave me disingenious vibe from both of them, I suspected the page has been sold & ownership transferred to TheGamer.
Back then I do have silly loyalty to stuff that I like, so I feel betrayed when they sold themselves to a sloppy article site.
Every once in a while they’d post buzzfeed-type of articles from their website. I eventually unfollowed the page.
They’ve been around so long but I don’t associate it with any major investigative article or any writer that made their name writing for them. It’s the most faceless notable gaming website and it’s notability to me seems entirely based around SEO and spamming social media with their blogspam articles
The only games I can think of where you fight back against racists as a Black person are Mafia 3 and Assassin’s Creed Freedom Cry. Maybe Dustborn too, if you count alternative history fascism. It’s wild that there isn’t more after so many years of video games. It makes the news of the cancelation incredibly sad.
videogameschronicle.com
Ważne