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[TGN] PC Gamer and other Future Publications Accused of Taking Bribes for Review Scores - Page 2

post #11 of 39
10/11/12 at 6:51am
Quote:
Originally Posted by ACallander View Post

Of course this is the norm but it's nice to see someones point of view if it is actually legit and real. No need to bash "far from news" bs over and over.. I posted it to discuss and open peoples eyes that might not know.

It's not bull. It's fact.

My family is in the publishing business so, I actually experience this first-hand.

If you want coverage, you give me a reason to cover you. If you don't give me a reason, it better be damn well worth covering.

I guarantee you that in every single article PCmag does there's an advertisement by the parent-company OR there's some back-scratching.

This system has existed since before the days of Benjamin Franklin and that's not news...In fact, I can find you some inquirers where arguably, Franklin scored a kick-back FOR mentioning certain entities.

Quite frankly, I don't believe that something is news if it's occurred regularly since the 1700's.

I mean, what do you expect? PcGamer to be 100% non-bias and not make any money what-so-ever? They would've never made it this long...You think Cosmo and Newsweek don't follow the same trends? How about People and Guitar Player?

Gamepro certainly did, Game-Informer did before they went on-line, Nintendo did...I'm sorry, it's just not news.
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post #12 of 39
10/11/12 at 7:19am
This probably won't change anything but I do hope it helps to slowly changes at least online perception on how stupid these X/10 scores can be. You find them in every product, and more often than not the scores are completely useless. 85/100 can't be bad right, I'm making a good purchase! Nope, not when some 95% of products are rated above 85/100. The whole bottom of the scale is useless. Throw the fact that most reviews are in-directly (maybe directly, depends on who you ask) massively influenced by how much money the publisher can throw around, and you end up with a pretty awful rating systems and a completely failure of that rating to equate to quality AT ALL. "Do you want to publish a front page article about behind the scenes of the new COD? Well why in the world would we let you see it when you rated the previous game so poorly?" Online is no better than paper at escaping this vicious cycle.

Except metacritic, but that has its own huge list of flaws. Too many companies fluffing their own scores, too many people voting 0 for dumb reasons. Although the 0 vote is interesting in its own right. It's more of a "no confidence" or disagreement vote than an actual review. Gives an indication of how many people are pissed.

In other news, Twitter conversations might be the most awful thing I have ever read. Could they possibly format that worse? There has to be a smarter way to handle replies.
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post #13 of 39
10/11/12 at 7:20am
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BeerPowered View Post

Old news is old. We already know review sites/magazines take bribes. Especially when it comes to the GOTY awards.

other than way back on original xbox when halo came out, that game at the time, deserved the GOTY title, now its quite the bribery game i do agree
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post #14 of 39
10/11/12 at 7:24am
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There will always be sheep that flock to the 10/10 games, which means things like this have and will continue to occur and there is pretty much nothing anyone can do about it.


The minority of people will try out games and trust word of mouth from people they trust but we will always be the minority.
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post #15 of 39
10/11/12 at 7:30am
Quote:
Originally Posted by jackbrennan2008 View Post

I stopped buying PC Gamer because all/most 'AAA' titles got extremely good ratings. Even if they listed 5 or 6 things they didn't like, the game still got over 90.

Same here. I was fed up with how they would give terrible games a 90 score just because they're of a popular series and then would give good games the shaft just because they aren't popular. I don't need to read PC Gamer to know that generic first-person shooter 5000 is popular. I originally subscribed to get somewhat of a sense on what games to buy. Not only are there other free ways (Youtube reviews, online reviews) to do this now but those free ways are a lot more truthful in their reviews. I've bought great games such as Amnesia and Terraria based on free reviews. I never would have bought those based on PC Gamer alone.
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post #16 of 39
10/11/12 at 7:47am
Didn't congress enact a law stating that reviews needed to state that they were taking money?
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post #17 of 39
10/11/12 at 7:50am
Edge writes the best reviews in the industry by a pretty large margin. I highly doubt the scores are paid for and even if they are you are doing it wrong if you just look at the score.
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post #18 of 39
10/11/12 at 7:53am
Quote:
Originally Posted by The-Beast View Post

Didn't congress enact a law stating that reviews needed to state that they were taking money?

Advertisements by a parent company doesn't count as taking money.

There are so many loopholes with publication revenue that there are genuinely, 100s of ways for a newspaper/magazine to get a kick-back and have it be perfectly legal.
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post #19 of 39
10/11/12 at 7:58am
If a gamer buys a game they read of a review of, he or she will probably look back at the reviewers if there's a disagreement. At the end of the day, reviewers should be tied to the genres they like.
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post #20 of 39
10/11/12 at 8:42am
I don't think it can be considered bribes... since reviewing on its own is something entirely subjective, and thus there is no chance you could argue against a review, unless you think your opinion is more objective than the other one, or the review is missing a ton of facts.

Anyway, this is normal on all sides. Specially since review sites depend on the advertising, most of the time, from the same products they actually review... which means that its pretty obvious that they will have some sort of bias if they want to keep that advertising where it is.. because, if advertising fails, the ability to do reviews will suffer the same fate.

All in all, nothing to see here, folks, move along...

PS: and the only way to avoid it would be... paid reviews, and still you wouldn't be sure of what is what.
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