Semi-professional reporters w/ unsustainable income streams + large studio advertising budgets + massive investments in AAA games != recipe for integrity
Steam refunds did more for game quality than most of the game journalism industry.
It's not even kickbacks. It's free games. It's sustaining paychecks. It's free food, booze and t-shirts. It's free steam keys, and trips to LA to meet developers.
It's not kickbacks. It would have amazed me to have even had that option of money bribes on the table: all I ever got were chocolates, plush dolls, a miniature plastic trebuchet. In the end, I never changed a rating because of any of that junk. But smaller outlets where they can't afford to be honest are swayed by this stuff. Most osf these folks you suspect are probably cheap fucking dates: bought with a game branded bottle or scotch.
There's a lot of money to be made by being a "Cheerleader for the Industry," and not as much in being the bastion of good content, honestly.
That's because the first option requires no real readers or followers, just sponsors. The second requires your content to be somehow better than everyone else's, and today that means competing with like, 10,000 other people one URL away.
1) Consumer product reviews, as if games were fridges or TVs.
2) Artistic engagement; either trying to be the "Roger Ebert of games", or the NGJ approach of self-interrogating the reviewer's feelings while playing the game, or the cultural studies/media studies approach of techniques and influences.
3) Sense of belonging to a fandom, like sports, and competing for victory. Either within the game or between competing fandoms.
The trouble with (1) is that it's at best dull and very easily degenerates into payola.
(2) had the potential to be far more interesting, but collided very badly with (3). Critique requires standing at a distance. When people identify themselves very strongly with the object of critique, they turn critique of the thing into criticism of themselves, and get very upset.
And finally (3) has the same problem that football(+) has long struggled with: hooligans, "ultras", and extreme partisanship taken out of the game. For football, this was to streets and pubs. For games, it's voice chat and forums filled with a never-ending torrent of abusive language.
Eventually gamergate provided an opportunity for (3) to mobilise, nominally against (1) but in practice destroying (2) in the process.
(+) "Soccer"
I remember realising slightly later than something similar was true for most magazine reviews. It still is.
That’s why I read Which.
Any other good gaming sites out there I should check out?
[1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ [2] http://gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-n...
Although he now writes for Kotaku, not RPS.
techraptor.com and nichegamer.com are pretty good.
That's...alarmingly obsessive. The article, I mean, not Grayson.
Now, here’s the point: you could spend the next year meticulously documenting every last store voucher the guy had ever received from gun shops B to Z and still no-one would care, because everyone knows that, even if it was true, it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference in the grand scheme of things. If you then announced that this was part of a larger campaign for “Clarity in Defense Spending” people would conclude that either a) you were truly clueless or b) you had an axe to grind with this guy that was nothing to do with gun store vouchers.
Anyway, that’s what people mean when they say “It was never about ethics in computer game journalism.”
As far as other good outlets, I think Techraptr is the only one I know of that holds water these days. Loved Tom Francis' work at PC Gamer back in the day too, before he left.
The thing that I find most troubling is publishers of video game review and news sites buying up publishers and distribution platforms, the latest being j2 Global, which owns Ziff Davis, IGN, PC Mag, Geek.com, and many more buying up Humble bundle on October 13.