Is there any reason to follow game journalism outlets anymore? Reading some positive/negative Steam reviews and watching some gameplay footage on its own gives a really good impression of what a game is like IMO.
I haven’t followed professional outlets for a long time. It’s pretty obvious most of them do not have enough time to give a proper review to these massive, 120+ hour long games. I used to read Computer Gaming World. Their reviewers would often mention that their rules required them to complete the game. Most of the reviews I see today, they don’t even necessarily get the whole fuckin’ game in their review copy. Just look at BG3.
Phenomenal game, with a solid story, incredible characters, fun game play, and just… Bugs. Lotta bugs. Especially after the first act. You might not even realize you are getting them because so many are that things that should happen, don’t. The reviews for it clearly only covered the first, most polished act. And even then, they didn’t actually mention bugs there and while it’s the most polished, it is still far from perfect. As time goes on and more people push further into the game, now those same review outlets put out editorials reporting on players bitching about the bugs on social media. Things that should have been covered in their own official reviews in the first damn place.
If all they’re going to do is write a bunch of bullshit they were likely paid to say, and then rely on users to generate more “news” content for them, I’m just going to stick with going straight to other players. There are still plenty that think for themselves and give honest, detailed descriptions of the game while trying to limit their personal opinions and bias. I want to be told how the thing actually is and make my own mind up based on my opinions; reviews can be objective.
Sounds like the real problem is publishers not actually finishing their games before release, so even if reviewers did try to play the whole thing, they couldn’t. The switch to digital downloads (over pressed media) has created an opportunity to do more with a game, but the reality is that it’s simply made games more expensive (since there is no resale market) and, worse, created an entire generation of game developers and managers who think that the launch date product is like a rough draft copy of their book report for Freshman English.
Stuff like this is why I never buy new games. Not only can you not trust the critics, but players get so blinded by hype and buyers remorse that they’ll ignore everything bad about the games they love.
It’s always wiser to wait for the hype to die down and see what the retrospective consensus is
This article made a damn good point about how much gaming websites depend on guides now. It hasn’t really clicked until now with me. I follow a bot on Mastodon that posts new articles from a bunch of different gaming sites, and it seems like half of them are for guides and walkthroughs. That’s where they get their ad bucks from, so that and SEO are the big focus.
Yeah, after Reddit died (as far as I’m concerned) I set up a tracker for a load of RSS feeds. A lot of them are, as you say, updates concerning walkthroughs and guides. Predominantly Baldurs Gate 3 at the moment.
Which is fine I guess, but it is very obvious what they’re pushing…I’d rather just have news.
yeah, it sucks and I just stick with the wiki source and proper sites I know. I am a hoarder so I don’t want to miss some good items I can get by accidentally wiping a area or block myself from them because of a wrong decision. Some of the generated sites are still refer to old early access stuff.
A lot of the article is focused on how games journalism has adapted to meet the current business environment (read advertising). Gaming is certainly not alone in that. Newspapers were hit a long time ago, and we've seen the same issues there too.
I'm curious -- what value do most people get from games journalism? Would people really miss if pcgamer, kotaku, or eurogamer just disappeared?
I'd really love to see a detailed balance sheet for some of these orgs to see what the actual operating costs are and how much is going to exec salaries.
People always claim they wanna see reviews before they buy their games, it’s the anthem of the anti-pre-orderer. Surely some of those reviews would come from games journalists.
The problem though is that it’s not sustainable to give away your content for free. You have to get advertisers to pay you and most people interested in games journalism are probably gonna have ad blockers, so then you have to fall back to whoever will pay you. You also have to avoid getting on a publishers bad side as a smaller journalist, or you’ll be black listed and your career will be over. So what can you do besides take money to fudge some reviews?
This is the problem with all free news content also, by the way. Somebody’s gonna pay for it, if it’s not you then it’s the people who want their opinions to be the prevailing one.
The only one I really value is Digital Foundry. I like how they break down games technically and give insight on how to get the most out of them through settings and whatnot.
But outside of that, I generally trust user reviews more.
It’s been probably 10 years or so since I was writing reviews, and I have to say, I never felt pressure to skew a review one way or another.
The biggest heat I got was from fanboys when I had a sneak peek at PAX of Duke Nukem Forever and had to report how shitty it was. “YOU DON’T KNOW!!! YOU DIDN’T PLAY THE WHOLE GAME!!! YOU HACK!!!”
And I was like “Yeah, you’re right, I didn’t play the whole game, I played what their marketing team WANTED me to play and it sucked, you think the parts they DIDN’T want me to play are going to be better?”
Surprise… the game stunk up the joint.
But when it came to reviewing games, I approached every review as if the game were a 10/10, and then as I played I looked for reasons to subtract or add points. The plusses and minuses would balance out and I’d have a final score.
As a former teacher, I used school grades, which is why I think most sites are on a 7-10 scale.
A - 90%+
B - 80%+
C - 70%+
D - 60%+
F - 59% and down.
A game can be bad because it’s a bad game or it can be bad because it’s functionally broken. D is generally the Ralph Wiggum of games, possible to like, but you have to admit it’s pretty bad.
I had to give a failing review to Assassin’s Creed Liberty on the Playstation Vita even though I really liked how it looked and it played, because it had a game breaking bug that made your save file unloadable. Ubi took 2 months to fix it, rendering it unplayable for the first two months after launch.
Once it was fixed, I amended the review, but it was plainly unacceptable to release it in a broken state like that.
What was the worst game that comes to mind from your time writing? I used to write album reviews for a metal site years ago and one of our writers got HIM’s latest album at the time. They really just didn’t like the album and I shit you not, the review garnered 1,000+ comments from pissed off fans. It got so out of hand, we had to close comments.
Had to be Duke Nukem Forever. I was talking with one of the devs and I was legit curious as to how their process worked because it had been in hell for so long…
“Were you able to use any of the original assets?”
“Oh, all of them!” He seemed super excited.
To use 14 year old assets and be incredibly proud of that? Eesh.
Oh, and Brink! Brink was so incredibly disappointing. They had this well developed world and a fantastic movement system, solid class based shooter… but then it all fell apart in the actual implementation of it.
I really, really, wanted to like Brink, but it was unplayable.
Say you have a level where the enemy is escorting a VIP and your goal is to eliminate the VIP before they get to the destination.
You roll in, wipe the team, wipe the VIP, then someone respawns, revives the VIP, and you keep going back and forth until the clock runs out.
It didn’t matter how many times you killed the VIP, all that mattered was if they were alive or dead when the clock ran out. Win/lose. Just crap design.
Man, DN4E sat in limbo forever. I remember waiting patiently for it knowing full well it would be a mess, but I didn’t care because I was such a massive Duke Nukem fan. Definitely on my list of bad games but I managed to complete it. It was so dated and clunky.
I vaguely remember Brink and all of the hype absolutely vanishing when it came out. I think I ended up skipping it because of the feedback people had.
Brink... Sigh. I remember that trailer coming out and I watched it like every day for years waiting for it to come. I watched every dev vlog, read every update. For years I was hyped on that. At time of release my buddy and I took the week off of work. We played it for like 3 hours one night and finished it. I remember thinking "there must be a mistake. This can't be it. This isn't the game I've been dreaming about." I never booted it up again after that first night.
It’s a shame, because if someone licensed the IP for, just spitballin’ here… A Fallout/Outer Worlds style game, the bones are there for a REALLY good game.
The assets, art, backstory, it’s all done, it just deserved a better developer. :(
I actually played through it last month and it blew me away. I cannot wait to do a second play through when phantom liberty comes out! It was so so good.
That happened for me too. Great 2077 experience through and through on good hardware with RT+DLSS. Had a couple bugs but nothing unsolvable like a puzzle with some saving involved, and they were things like scanning one thing early stops a scan later. Which is an unintended pretty cool mechanic lol, if only we’d been told it was a mechanic at the time.
Game got even crazier looking in recent updates and with better hardware, but I 100%ed it early and I haven’t done another playthrough since so I’ve been at the endgame through all the updates lol
I ran a gaming store at the time, with rentals. I remember when brink came out and I had the exact same experience when I took it home to try. At least I had no anticipation and didn’t pay anything for it.
The first Brink patch made it quasi-playable, but the damage had already been done.
And even after they fixed it, the AI still stank. They'd just ran back in the exact same path sometimes; to the point that you could just aim at a point and headshot all of them.
I think Brink was game that killed my naive trust in the hype machine. So much anticipation, so much desperation to enjoy it, so much disappointment. From there on I only believed the hyperbole from proven developers but eventually Destiny killed even that. Now I’m a bitter shell of a gamer who lives by the creed, “never pre-order!”
I actually enjoyed the hell out of Destiny, then Destiny 2 fucked everything up, got patched, got better, and then Bungie turned around and went “LOL - story missions? What’s that?” and cut 1/2 the content out of the game. Content I paid for.
No more money for Bungie after that, I’m surprised it’s somehow still going.
I was damn near 1k hours in D1. I think I'm still under 100 in 2, because somehow they managed to make every single map in the entire game a heaping pile of dogshit.
Jeff is ex (old) Gamespot, ex Giantbomb, and the guy who got fired from Gamespot due to external pressure from Eidos after he gave Kane and Lynch a 6 out of 10.
More likely that they know he's probably not going to give it a glowing review, especially after Fallout 4, so he didn't get one. This is something many publishers have historically done. It keeps reviews higher at launch so that people looking at reviews or metacritic scores see more positive information than after the dust settles.
I mean, if you phrase it that way, sure. Just a dude in his spare room. But then again, aside from the fact that he makes probably 20 000 dollar a month alone from his Patreon, almost everyone who is interested in video games knows this man’s name for way over a decade. More like two decades, actually. And while he certainly hasn’t anywhere near the same visibility as he had at Gamespot or Giantbomb, way more of the people who do follow him, actually pay him money directly. Reach alone isn’t what’s important these days. And yet, Jeff still has the potential to influence a lot of people who do not directly give him money. He also has a podcast, he streams and has 170k follower on Twitter. And if he has a very contrarian take on something, it will get noticed. Maybe not as much as 15 years ago but still noticed.
A bit of a ramble, sorry! I guess it triggered some memories of me listening to Giantbomb with him, Ryan, Vinnie, Alex and Brad while going to work or cleaning the house. Bombcast was pretty much the first podcast I regularly listened to.
Yeah, Ive followed Jeff for a long time and he's absolutely not afraid to say a game isn't good, and his tastes can be fickle and particular, if I were a publisher cynically selecting who to send advance codes to to manufacture a good score he would not be one of them.
As a consumer, I love him because he has integrity, likes what he likes, and says what he means, and I even can tell sometimes when he dislikes a game that I'd still like.
I realized the only game I play online is FFXIV, which doesn’t require PS+. I almost never play the “free” games they add to the service, and spend a non-zero amount of time browsing said free games in an effort to find something to play rather than something in my backlog. So I just canceled.
My membership is up in December and I doubt I’ll even notice when it’s gone.
Price rises aren’t welcome and the latest one does seem quite high. However I’ve been paying for plus since I got my PS4 and I’m still ok with it. Considering I maybe buy one game every two years for the price of another triple A game a year I’ve built up quite a library. The hours my partner has put into Spiritfarer, Slay the Spire and Hades indicates it’s still providing good value. Every month we at least check out the new games unless it’s a survival horror.
If I have one complaint it’s since I got off the CoD train as I got older when I do occasionally dip into the free ones via plus I find it very hard to find any online matches. I assume this is because all the hardcore players move pretty quickly to the current iteration leaving the lobbies of the older games empty.
Same here, I set to cancel renew every time I top up and since late ps4 time I don’t even add free games that are remotely interesting so I keep a cleaner library. And then when they announced the hike, I did the review and filter by games acquired via plus, same feeling, I almost never play those games, even though they look somewhat interesting and added them but probably never gonna play them since my primary interest and good backlog will last me long enough for next main games to release. So they will have the same treatment like my humble bundle games. And I also decide to not top up any more.
I wrote reviews(early 2000) during the late magazine era and even back then there were taboos about local influential company’s releases.(they only sign import deal and sell/distribute games locally.) Cause they survive on the ad money instead of subscription or individual purchases. Modern website sucks even more cause you made pennies for each view and if you don’t have something that covers enough contents to drive views, you will be at the mercy of promotion partners, same for the youtuber/streamer/influencer.
I mostly write review/walk through for import games, as there was usually a couple months delay for localization, even had contacts with local publisher that consult with group of writers about maybe which game to sign and import. The US/Japan publisher aren’t exactly nice guys you know, they will ask you to sign multiple games, including the games you know might not sell well as part of the deal. It’s a risky business and if companies that import games will try to influence review scores, you know how desperate the publisher will try to defend their “investment”.
Review summary: “If you see Carmageddon 64 in the shops, take it off the shelves, rip up the box and throw the cart repeatedly against the wall until it breaks”.
Classic
Edit: fuck me, fourty fucking quid for that game back then. That’s £70 with inflation!!!
Edit edit: I’m looking at the prices of the games I got in the 90s…fucking hell, we have it good nowadays. Of course literally everything else is more expensive but eh
I still look to Yahtzee when I'm curious about a game that's either new or I'm too broke to buy at the time.
Fuck a * out of * score. Tell me what annoyed you about the game, or what you enjoyed. So much more worth my time than seeing numbers and not looking into why those numbers exist.
Too many reviews just go through talking points from the publisher/dev anyway so they're useless.
At least Yahtzee gets to the fucking point of it all and in short time.
Does Starfield’s narrative cast Space Britain as the evil empire and climax with you hunting down and killing King Charles, who has been kept alive as a Futurama-like head in a jar?
I’ve only got a couple hours in but if doesn’t I’m disappointed! Keep my space tea tax free!
For the price of 2 games (or 1 and a half if it goes on sale, and it always did before), you can game all year. I’ve had mine for a year now, and not bought a game for it yet (apart from GoW Ragnarok which came bundled with it, and likely BG3 next week).
The top tier is kind of a bust. I picked it up because I thought I might play those PS1/2 games but I haven’t used that at all. There’s plenty of PS4 and 5 games still to play, and you can emulate up to PS3 on PC quite easily if you want to play old stuff. There’s scant few PS1 games anyway. It’s far from comprehensive. They should have done so much better here.
Yeah my kids don’t have gaming PCs (yet?) but have fun playing through a bunch of the plus stuff when they are not on Minecraft or (shudder) Roblox on their tablets.
I don’t have kids but I still find the random assortment of games a value add as I got a lot of games I would have considered anyway, so this was a much cheaper way of playing those games, best is all the random local multiplayer games that I can install for when I have friends over
Commercial media has always been collaborative with whatever power structures or industries it’s associated with. Only good media is independent, and even then you get some really shitty journalists, and sometimes entire rotten publications.
gamesindustry.biz
Aktywne