Penny Arcade basically broke the story with a comic, then followed up with a blog post saying that Eidos pulled a bunch of advertising after Jeff's review (or more specifically because of it's tone as he gave one of their games basically the same low score it's getting everywhere else), causing CNET (which owns GameSpot, where Jeff has worked for the last eleven years) to fire Jeff. Reading the fallout on the boards has been interesting. There are a few things we should keep in mind.
Any business is people.
Any "big game review site" is people. The people that make and promote the games they review pay for the reviewers' health care, mortages, homes, vacations, etc. Essentially, the game publishers own any business that covers games, effectively turning them into a PR arm of the industry. Now smart businesses that cover games know that their credibility is the only reason their sites are worth the hard disk space they take on the server and will take a short term hit. But businesses are only people, so CNET assumes no one will notice or care about them firing their senior editor and pulling the video form of his review to appease an advertiser. People are stupid.
There's no such thing as an objective review.
A distressing amount of talk on the boards centers on whether this and other reviews Jeff wrote meant he deserved to be fired, and on whether his reviews were objective enough. Just to have it on record, anyone who believes a reviewer should be fired over a single review has lost their place at the table, as far as I'm concerned. (Goes back to check whether he called for the firing of the reviewer who sucked at God Hand. Whew.) But the idea that a review can be objective needs to be crushed. No one is objective. Everyone has biases based on their previous experiences.
What's at stake here is integrity.
Eidos obviously has none because they pulled their ads, equating dollars to favorable reviews, so reviews of their products can't be trusted. GameSpot reviews cannot be trusted now because all the people doing reviews there know with perfect clarity that their livelihood rests on their review not offending the PR people at the publisher. This goes back to CNET being composed of stupid people. People who watch this sort of thing will now tell all of their friends to start reading 1UP instead. I hate their layout, but they're more trustworthy. But when the money gets big, the pressure gets big, and we probably won't even reach the next console generation before 1UP has some scandal of its own. So what do you, as a game buyer, do?
1 comment:
As usual, N'Gai has written up a very interesting piece also inspired by the firing. He, as a game journalist, is more interested in how it affects the press, not the consumer. But it's still a very good read.
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