Are mainstream games reviewers relevant?

After CNET and Gamespot's firing of Jeff Gerstman, I'm wondering if mainstream game reviewers are relevant. I just read a post of Mass Effect which had excerpts from a review whereby the reviewer had to retract statements, admit to low game play time, and further admit even that time was misstated.

I've been listening to the GFW podcast lately and those guys constantly whinge about the pressure they are under from game distributors to give higher scores, never mind the content of the review. I also just saw a vidcast of Cranky Geeks and the guests on that program, Greg Zachary and John Markoff of the New York Times, discussed the influence corporations such as Microsoft have towards their tech reporting.

Why do we even pay attention to mainstream games reviewers when they softball their reviews, concentrate on number scores, and when they do show some backbone they get fired? A lot of the games sites have devolved to cheer leading and screen shots. Now I admit I still get some game coverage from the mainstream reviewers I respect or when I find a review that is long and it's apparent the reviewer spent a lot of time with the game.

Most times I go to the forums though. I don't get reviews prior to release that way, but for the exception of a few titles, I don't buy games when they are first released. In forums I can get an overview of the games content and playability, what problems folks are having with the game, and a generally non-biased view of the game when all the posts are put together. I can even ask questions and get a response most times!

I don't think it's something you can generalise. I find with PC game reviews, I have to search around a bit to find a source I can agree with on some level. By agree, I mean a combination of finding the reviews honest, consistant and well reasoned, not that I have to agree with what they are saying. Sometimes it's best to find reviewers that you disagree with, since the things they like a lot may be things you dislike and what they hate you love. I've often found that to be the case when researching strategy games on Gamespot, particularly TBS or city builders. If they hate them I'll probably really like the games.

Some review sources as well are just more honest despite pressures. GfW magazine is pretty good overall for honesty. They do soften the edges a bit and it's pretty clear when a review is holding back, so that can be taken into consideration as well.

All in all, game reviews are not something you can take across the board at face value, they require an investment of your researching time to find ones that you trust and can work with. So, yes, they are relevant in some cases, but utterly irrelevant in others.

Good points, Gallifrey. I also have the reverse experience, that if some sites love something I pretty much know I won't like it. Can you give a little more info on GfW magazine--is that Games for Windows?--is it purely a paper media or also web?

AFA the concept of mainstream reviewing, for me it's right up there with political advertising. I tend to mostly discount it, especially when reviews are filled with the cut-an-paste current buzzwords like immersive, robust, cutting edge and so forth. If a reviewer has clearly taken the time to play a game to conclusion and describe it in his own words with obvious examples of his own experience, I take it more seriously, but in the end I mostly rely on forum feedback, small site reviews and the acid test, the game demo. I dread the day when the PR people get a hold of that process and start "enhancing" the demo with "buy me" sublimns and in game adverts.

Edit: Sidenote-another Gamespot editor quits. Interesting he was allowed to post this onsite.

I've been reading computer games magazines since the early 90's, especially Computer Gaming World and Computer Games Strategy Plus. It sure seems in my eyes that games reviewers have become softer and fluffier in recent years. I did state that I still give some credence to certain reviewers and that I do get some good info about games from certain games sites and magazines. I didn't give an complete generalization about games reviewers, but I do think the trend is on the downward curve for good journalism for gaming.

We've had this discussion a number of times before. I don't trust most paid reviewers where big money advertising is the norm. Small, independant, volunteer sites, like here and the Codex are far more reliable, especially if you know and understand their particular biases!!

I tend to treat games reviews as movie reviews, e g as supplementary information that might or might not be useful. As with movie reviews they give an idea of the general direction of the game, and certain buzzwords might be enough to tell me that the game WONT appeal to me. The quality of games reviews is however much lower and most of all more varied than for movies, mainly because movie reviewers almost always will have watched the entire movie...

The decision on whether to buy or not is based upon comments by the "beta testers" on this forum and a select few other places where I have a more specific idea of the taste of the audience. And of course on playable demos if available.

I basicallly take in everything big and little site, let it rattle around my head, and filter what I let settle thru common sense. Is everyone praising this game because it's truly good, or because theyre just excited about a sequel, or are they truly being influenced otherwise?

I dont read anyone's word about games as gospel, not even those I trust, because peoples statements will always vary for a myriad of reasons. It took lots of people here bouncing off the walls and posting favorably about Witcher, things I wanted to hear, and reading lots of good reviews before I finally gave in and bought it. Even tho I know none of you personally have a stake in the success of this game or would try to intentionally mislead me, and tho we are all rpg-heads, your opinion very well may differ from mine as to whether this particular flavor truly is good.

In the end we must use common sense to come to a decision, no matter the source. One can choose to live their lives in a state of perpetual paranoia, and think that nobody with any advertising can ever be looked upon as anything but a shill. I dont want to live like that, end up babbling crazy shit like Ace every other post

magerette said:

I also have the reverse experience, that if some sites love something I pretty much know I won't like it.

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That most likely means their tastes are different from yours. What we need to do is to choose a site which love the same elements as you do. Or, at least, we need to know the biases of fan sites well as Corwin pointed out above. If you read/watch/listen to multiple news materials, you must have already been trained in dealing with some biases.

As well as checking fan sites, I became accustomed to checking user reviews nowadays. If a reviewer can writes well, then, he/she must have read a certain amount of materials, which is a good sign. If the reviewers' score is about average, it is also a good sign since extreme scores indicate likewise extreme preferences. Also, some reviewers can be very informative for specific parts, too. They are useful when you'd like to see more detailed overlook to a specific factors. Considering these things, I think Gamespot is a good place to check games since there are quite a traffic and some reviews are better than the editors'. Different from film and book reviews, many professional editors are not so good at writing. Printed media tends to be more strict on this account but I don't think I need to buy game magazines. Rather, I'd simply wait for user reviews coming up before I buy a certain games. To avoid spoilers, skimming technique is very handy. Like other things on the net, we have to learn how to choose the information we need.

As I´ve posted a couple of times before I think the whole "professional review" system is deeply flawed.
The few staff editors have little time for too many games. Which means they have to set priorities, which are of course the mainstream games their audience wants to hear about. Small games don´t get a fair chance.
Freelancers get paid a few hundred bucks per review. I don´t know the actual number, but let´s say it´s 400$, just for the sake of the argument. From what I´ve heard that´s already one of the better paid gigs. The Freelancer is self-employed, he needs to pay his rent, pay taxes, pay health insurance & similar stuff, maybe feed a family, and earning a little money to compensate for the risk would also be nice. So how long can he work for 400$? Something like two days probably, and even then he is underpaid. Now let him review The Witcher in 2 days * 10 hours. That´s 20 hours to play the game, collect infos, make screenshots, write the article and edit parts of the article upon request. Maybe this can work for a shooter, an adventure or an action-adventure. But certainly not for an RPG, an MMO or a deep strategy game. The result is a sloppy review, often biased by word of mouth and only based upon the first couple of hours of gameplay. Don´t get me wrong, I don´t blame the reviewer. He has to make a living, all he can do is deliver his work and move on. The more "famous" freelancers can afford to work a bit more carefully because they are often able to sell multiple articles on the same game to different publications - articles on mainstream games of course.

We have talked about this, and I think that it is a shame that we have to worry about 'bought' reviews. But then, do you ever go to Rottentomatoes and look at movie reviews? Notice a couple that seem *way* out of kilter with the others? Um hum. Same deal, I assume. When I see a 1/10 review when the rest of the population is between 6-8 I assume personal agenda, and when I see 10/10 when the rest of the population is between 4-6 is true I also wonder about the score.

That is what bugs me so much about scoring - some sites have been playing with 'true 0-10 score systems' which then really just skew things low when someone looks at a meta-review.

The bottom line is that we look at reviews to see if the thing is any good before spending money (or, actually the majority look at them afterwards to see if the reviewer 'gets it right') ... so there needs to be something along with a bunch of text indicating suitability to purchase.

Folks, it's not just game reviewers. It's tech journalism in general. Hell, perhaps it's journalism in general.

I just came across this gem on one of the most respected tech sites on the net.

A review of... a press conference.

Sweet Jesus on a bicycle!

I was under the clearly mistaken impression that the function of tech reporters is to report on the tech, not to whine about the diction of the speaker in a press conference. It may be that Samsung has nothing interesting to announce at the conference; if so, then I would expect there to be a dearth of Samsung-related news, or at most a note somewhere in a general article commenting that Samsung announced unusually few initiatives and products.

But I'm not the least bit interested in how beautifully orchestrated their press conferences are.

Oh, and check out the one on Bill Gates's keynote too. Apparently his video scores a "B," and he got Slash to help him out in a Guitar Hero contest.

/me crawls off to calm down

Depends on the magazine/site I guess. Ive read my own language "Pelit" magazine for 16 years and they are still quite good. Great columns and fair reviews for both mainstream and indie games. They even reviewed echelon:book 1 on this months issue. Gave it 2 pages and 84% with recommendations. In the past they have reviewed other indies too from spiderweb to nahlakh.

I tend to treat games reviews as movie reviews, e g as supplementary information that might or might not be useful. As with movie reviews they give an idea of the general direction of the game, and certain buzzwords might be enough to tell me that the game WONT appeal to me.

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That's my method as well for the most part. In relation to movies, I've pretty much outgrown the teen comedy genre so I probably would have given Superbad a pass and not even considered watching it. I've seen some good press and good buzz about it and I'm willing to give it a shot. It's now on my Netflix list.

I just wanted to add one more observation about games reviews is that I see a fair amount of gamers using them as confirmation for their fan boy status of their favorite game. It's amazing the vehemence of these folks when the review does not live up to their own view of the game. Games scores really feed this in that the fan boys will froth at the mouth when they see differing scores, i.e. anything less than a 10.

Prime Junta said:

Folks, it's not just game reviewers. It's tech journalism in general. Hell, perhaps it's journalism in general.

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It is very different than when we (I) grew up and news came 4 times a day - 3 by TV and 1 by newspaper. [curmudgeon mode on] Nowadays news portals are like a$$h*oles ... everyone has them and everything that comes out of them stinks like sh!t! [/curmudgeon mode off]

... joins PJ to go calm down ...

You all know how I feel about it--I think Geist made the best post ever on journalism and mass media in the P&R forum and I wish I had time to find it but I'm supposed to be posting news atm--let's just say times have indeed changed, and that the level of responsibility in all journalism seems questionable. The rather romantic '30's image of the hard-drinking, crusading journalist who roots out answers to important issues and attempts to present a true picture uninfluenced by pressures of the rich and powerful and regardless of the personal cost seems to have been lost in the transition to the tabloid paparazzi mode.

That said, I agree also with the calmer posters that all the information out there can be sifted through the seive of one's own balance, reason and tilt to find out what needs to be found out if you have the patience, curiosity and time. It's just unfortunate that you have to approach everything in the media with a salt-mine's worth of salt.

More than ever it's important to understand who's doing the talking, who they're talking to and why that's important to them. Without realizing it, a lot of us have become comfortable with the sound and feel of product PR.

It's the Net; it's high technology in general; it's the manipulation of good people's trust and desire to believe in what they know is right, that journalists ought to be able to be trusted. It's the genuine difficulty of trying to identify who is, and who is not, reporting objectively.

To me journalism is about committment and sacrifice. It's something you do because it's worth doing, not because you're going to make a lot of money doing it. It's a lousy idea in all the ways that make good business sense. But it's a great idea for all the right reasons.

Until we reach a point where most newspaper editors and TV anchormen play and understand video games, we're probably not going to see a lot of high-quality journalistic objectivity.

If we consider games reviewers journalists then I'm afraid the vast majority of them are at the bottom of the journalistic food chain

When it comes to the quality journalism in general I think that we can blame the increased quantity of information available through the net. As with any goods a rapid increase in quantity tends to mean a reduction in average quality. The absolute amount of good material hasnt necessarily dropped, but one has to look harder for it. IMHO this isnt different from what happened to games quality as gaming became more mainstream.

And for computer games reviews it's a genre that most of the time wont attract the cream of the journalistic crop, add that to the outright impossible equation of giving a complex game such as a RPG a fair review in the short timespan given and one realise that it is risky to put expectations too high.

magerette said:

That said, I agree also with the calmer posters that all the information out there can be sifted through the seive of one's own balance, reason and tilt to find out what needs to be found out if you have the patience, curiosity and time.

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It shouldn't require that much. Maybe it depends on how many games you track, though. In my personal case, for example, I played four games the last year, only finishing two of them but I have no regret about games I bought. So, I think there is a fruit.

magerette said:

It's just unfortunate that you have to approach everything in the media with a salt-mine's worth of salt.

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As for the pessimism, I feel there is blind belief on professionalism as a background. To my eyes, some individual reviewers are proven to be better than some "professional" ones, which shows the possibility of grass-root journalism on the net. Of course, we shouldn't place another blind reliance on it. In fact, I have to filter out quite a lot of "information." Probably, the last resort is just out own critical thinking and individual preferences.