Reviews Are Serious Business

Posted on January 22, 2008 by Scott Jennings| 6 Comments

Via Slashdot, Sam Kennedy, editor of 1UP, has a good post-mortem on Gamespot’s Gerstmanngate.

As a marketer, if you recognized you needed more traffic to your product, you could buy it. You could even buy a top placement for your title on the GameSpot homepage, pretty much assuring clicks to coverage on your title, regardless of whether there was organic interest or not. And we’re not talking about just banner advertisements here — we’re talking about buying one of the top stories on the front of the site.

A writer by the name of Amadeo Plaza, who works for an advertising agency that did business with GameSpot, had this to say on the subject:

I don’t mean to maliciously call GameSpot out on this, but if you didn’t know, they sell a lot of their content coverage. The front-door rotation spots, otherwise known as “gumballs,” on the homepage are paid for by game publishers at $7,000/2 weeks (March 2006); and if you remember back, they absolutely whored themselves out to Vivendi for the release of 50 Cent: Bulletproof, a game that everyone and their mother knew was going to be terrible.

It’s encouraging that we’re starting to see accountability (even if user-driven rather than editorially) in the gaming media.

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  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    No regrets at all that I didn’t pursue a career in gaming journalism. But I do think game companies ought to realize just how transparent it all has been for a long time, now. I haven’t gone to Gamespot for a review in forever, and yes I remember when it was an independent site that slowly and carefully built up a following based on reliable reviews.

    Destructoid is all you need now. But you can’t make a living writing for it, which is why one of their writers recently jumped to Wired’s GameLife column.

  • =j

    Finding a good game review site is very difficult. Need someone (a) informed, (b) likes what I like, (c) can write, and (d) is not some coprorate shill. Thankfully, I don’t have much in the way of spare time, so this dilema does not present itself often. OTOH, since I do not spend much time following games when I do need a good review site, I REALLY need one. Having shits like gamespot sellout wholesale really pisses me off.

  • http://hitnrun.blogspot.com HitNRun

    I liked Gamespot – I still do, technically – but I won’t go back there because of this.

    It’s simply a matter of principle over convenience. I stopped using IGN many years ago because that site is much more overtly corrupt, uninformative, and untrustworthy. I was always had the vague sense that Gamespot was not entirely honest, but I kept giving them my eyeballs because, really, who cares what games are on the front page. If a bad game could justify top billing by being “a big release,” more power to it. Meanwhile, I’ll be clicking “PC” and looking up a more specific game.

    But with the circumstances of the Gerstmann firing, and now this disclosure, I would feel uncomfortable using the site. I was no Gerstmann fan and I don’t care about them selling placement to a degree (like what ads they slap in my friend), but Jesus Christ, we’re talking about the content of the site. Like, the actual words. That’s a no-no.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com/ J.

    Commercial review sites are good for only one thing: Box quotations.

    Most people don’t base their decisions on whether to buy a game on the Internet. They base them on word of mouth, buzz, TV commercials and game-store impulse.

  • Steve

    I get all my reviews from Penny Arcade and Zero Punctuation.

  • UnSub

    Sorry J., but you are missing the point if you think everyone has to read an online review as part of the decision to purchase a game. Not everyone does, but it certainly adds to the word of mouth and buzz if something is reviewing well (and detracts if the reviews are poor). There are exceptions – the so-called review proof games like Halo 3 or GTA IV – but commercial review sites help build those intangible things that help sell games.

    Also, few games have the ad budget to develop TV commercials. Building awareness of a game often starts at the commercial game site, with it’s previews and hands-on and such.