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Comment by CyberDildonics | Hacker News Reader

This is 'article' is just an advertisement

OP here: Is there anything that makes you say that other than the fact that it’s positive and I received a review key? I’ve written about plenty of games I didn’t enjoy that I got for free (e.g. for judging awards) including games that were very well-received, like Viewfinder and Pacific Drive.

Posting a review for an arbitrary game to HN definitely smells like advertising to me. I don’t think you would be posting an article like this to HN that shat on a relatively unknown indie game you didn’t like.

How is this _not_ advertising in your mind? Surely you don’t think random people on HN are invested in your take on this game. What purpose did you intend if not to promote the newly released game?

I feel you’re trying to say you weren’t paid to advertise this game, which I believe, but it is 100% what you’re doing.

A lot of people do this, no? It doesn't seem more offensive than any of the other handful of self-submissions per day; certainly it's less so to me than all those tech blog posts by companies. Also Blue Prince is a puzzly, escape-roomy game that's one of the highest-profile indie releases this year, so probably more in tune with HN's taste than most games.

I like that a link aggregator serves to surface things that people don't necessarily have investment in. I thought the article was well-written and I'm more interested now in what he has to say in future. (I guess the advertising worked...)

Do a lot of people do this? I don’t actually feel like this happens much here.

Idk. I feel it has a bad smell to be doing this at a game’s release with a review copy.

Again I’m willing to believe in good faith that there aren’t behind the scenes incentives here. But it would feel a lot more genuine to drop this at least a few months later imo. It _feels_ like advertising.

And frankly the juxtaposition of the glowing tone and then negative comments here has really thrown me about the whole thing. Whereas before I would just say it’s a difference of opinion, now there’s a question of intent to deceive. Meh.

That makes sense. The juxtaposition isn't just OP, though: Blue Prince is an extremely highly-rated game by critics (https://www.metacritic.com/game/blue-prince/critic-reviews/), and will likely be one of the three highest-rated games this year, but has 80% positive reviews on Steam at time of writing, which is very low. On Steam it isn't even in the top 3 on its single day of release.

I'm not exactly sure what leads to such a dramatic disconnect. Maybe game reviewers just value different things than the general population.

it seems like it might be mostly attributable to the RNG element of the game

Game reviewers don't spend as long with a game as regular players. They play enough hours until they feel like they have a good enough handle on the game to write the review.

A game which maintains a high level of engagement during that review period but which drops off not long after that could show this kind of discrepancy between customers and reviewers. I don't want to suggest that Blue Prince is this sort of game (never mind that it might be deliberate) but I think it's possible for some games to have been designed for game reviewers rather than for long-term players. The top HN comment on this story (as I write this) would seem to indicate that the game has an issue with running out of steam after a few hours.

This sort of thing is not unheard of in other media as well. In the film industry this strategy is called Oscar-bait. Of course for a film it's not based on duration but subject matter. Certain themes and filmmaking techniques have been accused of being targeted at the narrower interests of the Academy rather than a broad audience.

Many of the people reviewing the game highly (at well-regarded publications) have spoken about playing the game for tens of hours, some mentioning 100h+.

This is conspiratorial nonsense.

I do think random people are invested in my take on this game, yes. If they weren't, it wouldn't have been upvoted. It's actually very difficult to get links on the front page of HN, the signal to noise is quite high.

I post around a third to a half of the articles I write on my blog to HN – the ones I think people here will like. Sometimes they hit and sometimes they don't. Three weeks ago I wrote about Odysseus, a very ambitious larp, that was popular here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43414992

And last year I wrote about my thoughts on The Sphere in Las Vegas:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40858165

As for things I disliked, I wrote about Tonight with the Impressionists, a VR exhibition in Paris:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40745133

I think you are saying that anyone posting a positive article about something you don't know about on HN is a shill, which seems quite strange. Sometimes people genuinely like things and want to share their thoughts on why.

My final note is that Blue Prince is not a relatively unknown indie game. It was included for free on PS Plus and Xbox Game Pass at launch – quite unusual. It was also previewed by quite a few publications and is almost certainly going to be shortlisted in a lot of game of the year lists.

And to be clear, I have not been paid to write this article. There are no incentives involved whatsoever.

I haven't heard about this game until today, but literally 10 mins before reading this on HN I was reading this Polygon article about it https://www.polygon.com/awards/557285/blue-prince-game-of-th...

So it seems it's quite popular.

Look, I believe you.

What I’m saying is that it doesn’t feel obvious that I should definitely believe you. You are unambiguously promoting this newly released game. By doing this a savvy reader does need to question whether or not you’re a shill. And that is tiring. It is fully possible that this article is intended to manipulate.

Maybe background info on your past activities can provide evidence to reinforce the idea that you are doing this only because you want to. But I’m not really interested in researching you. Content like this is just not easily readable with blind trust.

I thought it was a well written and entertaining review. While I’m probably not going to buy the game, I think what the author wrote, and this discussion here is important for discovering games I might be interested in.

I haven't seen a single good review from anyone I trust, most people are saying it's not good.

FWIW Adrian Hon (the writer) is easily the game reviewer that I trust the most! I am quite sensitive to false positives with games - it really sucks to spend a few hours on a game that you drop - and my false positive rate with his reviews is very low.

(I have no affiliation with this post beyond being a fan of Adrian's writing and work + haven't played Blue Prince yet, although I'm very likely to play it because of this review)

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