"We in no way trade scores for an exclusive," said IGN VP Tal Blevins, adding that publishers have no access to or say in the text of a review before it goes live. That doesn't mean IGN didn't make any concessions to secure the exclusive, though. IGN Xbox editor Hilary Goldstein admitted the site used promotional placement on the site's top feature bar to secure the exclusive. "Our bargaining chip is to basically say, 'I will put it here if you let me have this,'" Goldstein said. Mastrapa likened the practice to an "exclusive cover story" in a game magazine.
As for Variety and Fritz, Goldstein seemed unimpressed with with his journalism bona fides. "Nobody from Variety called us and said, 'Hey, would you like to comment about this?'" he said. "He says in blog post, 'If I had the game right now I would have broken the embargo.' To me that goes against your ethics." Nothing like an I'm-more-ethical-than-thou battle to get your heart racing in the morning.
(Page 1) Reader Comments
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lol
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+1
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the rodham's seem like nice enough people.
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Out of context quote of the day right there.
As for the article, why bother even asking IGN? Are they really expecting them to say yeah we were paid off? Give me a break
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Look what happens when a hyped game gets a slightly lower score than the norm (like an 8.x when everywhere else is 9.x). The internet explodes and the site drowns in hate mail. And everybody simply dismisses the lower review as "wanting to be different"
Because let's face it, after IGN's 7-page fangasm of a review, who was going to dare try and suggest that GTAIV wasn't anything but prefect? Knowing full well that the tone was set and anybody who dared to say otherwise would be ignored anyway?
Yeah, I wouldn't have minded being "bribed" with Gears of War graphics, solid vehicle controls, and innovative and imaginative gameplay. I guess what I'm saying is: if GTAIV had been Marcus Fenix rolling around an underwater Liberty City in a katamari ball composed of Project Gotham Racing cars... I too would've given it a perfect 10.
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I think on most of the polarizing games (i.e. Assassins Creed, Army of Two, etc.) they do the best job at pointing out the flaws in the game as well as things done well in the game. I really think if people objectively looked at their reviews they would see the same thing.
homerj
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My ex-wife used to say that all the time.
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If a publisher is proud of a product, and wants to generate some hype prior to release, why wouldn't they put out some review copies a couple weeks before launch?
On the other side of things, when you get into the practice of trading advertising space for.... well anything other than money, you run into the possibility of corruption. Frankly the marketing / advertising dept should have no connections to the reviewers. If they do, that creates an upsetting gray area where good press could become a bargaining chip. Am I saying that happened here? No - the game is great, and deserves the high scores it is getting. However, I do think it's possible that a 9.8 could have very easily turned into a 10 with the privilege of having the first review on the internets.
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Riiiight. And politicians in no way trade favors for campaign contributions. Really. Just ask them.
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Anyone wonders why videogame "journalism" is never taken seriously, it's because of crap like this - the fine folks at Gamespot and IGN simply have no concept of journalistic integrity.
Think of it this way: IGN needs Rockstar's advertising $$ to survive. Even if Rockstar/Take Two had no access to the text of the review and no promises were made about the review score, how low do you think this world-exclusive review could have scored, given Rockstar's past behavior (where a 9.5 is considered an atrocity), and still have allowed for the possibility of another exclusive when GTAV comes out? And how long do you think Goldstein would have kept his job if Rockstar had gone to the higher-ups at IGN and cancelled future advertisements based on the score/text of the review?
The promise was implied by the structure of the deal. Don't kid yourself.
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Good work IGN for securing that deal. With every video game blog in the world linking to their review when it popped added mega page views to their site which netted them some healthy revenue, and I'm sure whoever got to play the pre-release copy was happy as well.
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I'm glad people are continuing to hammer on these guys for their obvious obsequiousness to publishers. If IGN's SEVEN-PAGE review had even *mentioned* how sluggish the controls feel, for instance, I might be more inclined to believe that their review was at least an attempt at critical analysis. But it wasn't - it was an exercise in "who can clap the loudest."
Thing is, these big reviews set the tone for how the game gets reviewed. A handful of terrible scores sets the stage for the rest of the internet to tear a game to pieces. A handful of good ones gets everyone scrambling to worship the game the most. Lair and SSBB are two easy examples of how this works.
Publishers understand that. If GTA had gone out of the gate with an 8, or even a 9.0, the tone of the coverage would be radically different. Rockstar understands this better than anyone else out there. You think they'd risk an impartial review on a game that cost them a hundred million to make?
Some day, the few really excellent game *journalists* will seed a movement of really excellent game journalism. IMO, the blog-format sites like Joystiq and Kotaku, and a couple genuinely good jourlalists, like Steven Kent, N'Gai Croal and Stephen Tolito are setting the stage to overthrow the obviously corrupt existing "game journalism" status quo.
Can't happen soon enough.
truthfully if one were to look at the whole picture, one would realize that if the traded a good review for a sneak peak, then all the other good reviews (almost every one of them) would also be botched. there is no way in hell that 90 percent of the 9+ reviews are because of deals with rockstar.
the game is fantastic, there's no doubt, so why does it matter if everyone is saying the same thing?
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Without integrity, you have nothing.
if it turns out that the did take a bribe, then i retract my previous statements, but to me, a score is a score, and as long as every other score is close to that one, then the game socially accepted as a strong title and will be remembered.
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Those initial impressions matter. In the public eye, Gore was now "challenging" Bush for the win, even though the statistical difference between the two was insignificant (this is why it sucks that most Americans are basically math-illiterate - try explaining statistical significance to someone at a time when it actually matters. Whoo - painful).
This put Gore at a foot of a massive uphill battle. The same thing happens with these kinds of subjective judgements. Much as you'd like to believe that each individual opinion is its own precious snowflake, the thing that marketers know is that "public opinion" and peer pressure play a *huge* part in perception of quality. It's much harder for a critical review of GTA IV to be taken seriously when the rest of the internet is awash in cries of "10/10!"
Look at the huge number of reviews. Have you read any of them that mention that the camera control is garbage? That the player controls are incredibly sluggish? That many of the missions are incredibly tedious? That the phone text is almost too small to read on anything but a huge TV? Reviews are supposed to be critical, but GTA IV's have had reviewers at the major sites falling over themselves to see who could lavish the most praise on it.
Yeah, it's a great experience - the size and scope of the city are astonishing. But there are parts of it that are legitimately, straightforwardly awful and no one mentioned those *at all*.
The tide had already turned. The consensus opinion was that the game was a 10/10. IGN's initial salvo helped establish that. You think that was one person's honest opinion? One person who negotiated the commercial sale of major, major advertising on one of the biggest game sites on the 'net?
Don't make me laugh.
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But I gotta say, i've never really had any problems with IGN. They seem pretty honest and open.. at least compared to gamespot.
They also seem pretty above board in this situation. (though in the case of Cover Exclusives on magazines it did often seem to lead to inflated scores for mediocre games.)
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