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Arsenic Lupin posted:I was under the impression that Rock Paper Shotgun was clean. Sort of. Their parent company Reedpop hosts game/comic/fandom conventions. So RPS' writers have to cover all those events in detail. They can say whatever they want about the actual games. Gaming journalism is never bought and paid for, unless you mean the outlets themselves are bought by gaming companies. Or publishers just don't give them interviews/pre-views etc. Not even the editors get bribed, its kind of a lovely deal all around  E: yeah what Fajita said Fruits of the sea fucked around with this message at 20:13 on May 30, 2023 |
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May 30, 2023 20:08
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It's not outright payment, it's the expectation that if you write reviews which aren't stellar you will stop getting perks like early access game copies and ad buys which allow you to exist and do your job.
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May 30, 2023 20:11
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Fruits of the sea posted:Sort of. Their parent company Reedpop hosts game/comic/fandom conventions. So RPS' writers have to cover all those events in detail. They can say whatever they want about the actual games. Gamespot fired gerstman because he put out a luke warm review of Kane and Lynch while they were paying for a site skin. I don't know that it's common, but to say it's never happened is a little strange.
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May 30, 2023 20:29
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I'm sure outlets put ad-related pressure on their writers (like what happened with Gerstmann at Gamespot) but for the most part I'm guessing publishers feel safer not being directly involved in petty cash bribes. Easier to do what Bethesda does and just not send out review copies or talk to journalists and let their ad budget talk to the public.
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May 30, 2023 20:31
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I was under the impression that Rock Paper Shotgun was clean.
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May 30, 2023 20:31
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Fajita Queen posted:It's not outright payment, it's the expectation that if you write reviews which aren't stellar you will stop getting perks like early access game copies and ad buys which allow you to exist and do your job. Its not only the Evil Publisher its the problem with most SI press. This is a not very intellectual demanding hobby based job, so people who actually like games but aren't necessarily good writers/thinkers/critics or have any kind of education in that field are often the people who write reviews or news. The audience is neither (or mostly at least) interested in some more in-depth thoughts about it as it is not that kind of hobby for most parts so it remains just glorifying everything the writer personally likes, making it more or less unintentional marketing. RPS current EIC is a very good example for this type I think. I've never read anything remotely critical from her and her texts are full of emotional fillers in favor of the subject. gamesindustry.biz is usually a very welcome exception here as an "industry" magazine (same as gamedeveloper but they lost good staff over the years) but doesn't necessarily cover d2d information haldolium fucked around with this message at 20:41 on May 30, 2023 |
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May 30, 2023 20:38
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MarcusSA posted:You’d think there would be some ethics in games journalism. Aw c'mon. Please don't GamerGate-joke without making it a little more obvious you're anti-gamergate
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May 30, 2023 20:53
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Randallteal posted:I'm sure outlets put ad-related pressure on their writers (like what happened with Gerstmann at Gamespot) but for the most part I'm guessing publishers feel safer not being directly involved in petty cash bribes. Easier to do what Bethesda does and just not send out review copies or talk to journalists and let their ad budget talk to the public. Alannah Pierce did a video about it and that from her experience aside from the really blatant cases like Gerstmann in general reviewers don't worry about publishers nearly as much as they worry about the community response to low reviews.
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May 30, 2023 21:01
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leper khan posted:Gamespot fired gerstman because he put out a luke warm review of Kane and Lynch while they were paying for a site skin. That's what everybody assumed happened, but the actual instigator was Sony complaining about Jeff's 7.5 review of a Ratchet & Clank: Future Tools of Destruction.
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May 30, 2023 22:39
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YouTube is the new home for decent gaming journalism. You’ll have to spend a lot of time separating the signal from the noise, but it’s there. The ad model on written journalism is so broken I don’t understand how RPS is still around.
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May 30, 2023 22:51
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I really don't think I would trust individual youtubers to be less vulnerable to bribes/pressure from game companies, to be honest
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May 30, 2023 23:34
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pseudorandom name posted:That's what everybody assumed happened, but the actual instigator was Sony complaining about Jeff's 7.5 review of a Ratchet & Clank: Future Tools of Destruction. Even funnier
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May 30, 2023 23:36
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Drakkel posted:I really don't think I would trust individual youtubers to be less vulnerable to bribes/pressure from game companies, to be honest They absolutely do sponsored videos and don't always disclose that appropriately.
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May 30, 2023 23:37
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Oh, and to further clarify, game publishers routinely complained to GameSpot management about game review scores, including current advertisers. The new management just happened to be pathetic bootlickers who actually did something other than ignore it. So this isn't even really Sony's fault.
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May 30, 2023 23:38
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haldolium posted:Its not only the Evil Publisher its the problem with most SI press. This is a not very intellectual demanding hobby based job, so people who actually like games but aren't necessarily good writers/thinkers/critics or have any kind of education in that field are often the people who write reviews or news. The audience is neither (or mostly at least) interested in some more in-depth thoughts about it as it is not that kind of hobby for most parts so it remains just glorifying everything the writer personally likes, making it more or less unintentional marketing. the other issue is that 'game criticism/opinion pieces/reviews' and 'game journalism' are often written by the same people so that leads to a lack of focus on one or the other, or weird mixing of the two. like roger ebert wasnt out there giving us updates on box office returns.
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May 30, 2023 23:41
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"Journalism" being a mouthpiece for whoever has money or influence is hardly just a games industry problem, to be fair. It's like that pretty much across the board. Also game reviews being considered journalism is another weird thing that shouldn't be the case.
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May 30, 2023 23:46
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I’m just thinking of how it was more general outlets that first broke the story about Acti ’s culture of systemic sexual harassmentOn the one hand, I get that the big media companies obviously have a lot more resources on hand overall compared to your typical game news sites. But on the other, they got beaten to the punch (for what was easily the story of the year in the games industry, at that) on something that’s ostensibly supposed to be in their wheelhouse. Regalingualius fucked around with this message at 00:17 on May 31, 2023 |
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May 31, 2023 00:14
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Fajita Queen posted:"Journalism" being a mouthpiece for whoever has money or influence is hardly just a games industry problem, to be fair. It's like that pretty much across the board. 
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May 31, 2023 00:24
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Drakkel posted:I really don't think I would trust individual youtubers to be less vulnerable to bribes/pressure from game companies, to be honest the amount of money streamers and content creators get paid to highlight a game for a video or a few days/week of playing is actually wild. very little of that appears to be tagged as such, too.
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May 31, 2023 01:29
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Herstory Begins Now posted:the amount of money streamers and content creators get paid to highlight a game for a video or a few days/week of playing is actually wild. very little of that appears to be tagged as such, too. Yeah it's part of advertising law in the UK at least that if a Youtube video or social media post is sponsored it needs to be clearly marked, before the user clicks on it in the case of a Youtube video. Of course no Youtubers do this because nobody wants to watch an ad so if you tag the video as an ad no-one watches it. On the games media I remember a writer for Official Nintendo Magazine UK telling a story about how he was told he had to give a good score to a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game, but they didn't care about the text of the review. So he wrote this brutally negative review but just slapped an 85% at the end and no-one cared because it's all about maintaining that Metacritic average. You see this with people raging about outlier reviews where the line is "You just want to ruin the metascore". Of course it doesn't help the media's image that so many people go from games media outlets to working PR and dev jobs in the industry. Like how Sisi Yiang who was famous for writing extremely pro-gacha articles for Kotaku last week posted that she'd been hired as a writer for Genshin Impact.
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May 31, 2023 11:36
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The pernicious thing on youtube is people saying 'Not sponsored, not affiliated! But the company did send me all this product for free!' Well then you are affiliated, aren't you, really. Because if you trash the stuff they'll probably stop sending you product for free. Nerdecrafter is bad like this.
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May 31, 2023 12:01
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HopperUK posted:The pernicious thing on youtube is people saying 'Not sponsored, not affiliated! But the company did send me all this product for free!' Well then you are affiliated, aren't you, really. Because if you trash the stuff they'll probably stop sending you product for free. Nerdecrafter is bad like this.
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May 31, 2023 12:12
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Endorph posted:tbf im not entirely sure how true that is because ive definitely seen people say 'they sent me this for free and it sucks' and still get free copies I suppose that is fair enough, though surprising. Maybe it depends on the company.
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May 31, 2023 12:18
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There should be an expectation that a publisher will send a reputable reviewer a free review copy of an item. But obviously without strict guidelines around that, it quickly and very easily morphs into the relationship we more commonly see now where a publisher can withhold access after bad reviews and a reviewer wants to give good reviews because all this free stuff is good. Like in a perfect world you'd want someone reviewing whose cash comes from stuff almost completely orthogonal to games in general. But I've not found anyone who's managed to make "Reviewing videogames but advertising an accounting system" work just yet.
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May 31, 2023 12:23
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Natural 20 posted:Like in a perfect world you'd want someone reviewing whose cash comes from stuff almost completely orthogonal to games in general. But I've not found anyone who's managed to make "Reviewing videogames but advertising an accounting system" work just yet. Closest to that are probably people sponsored by G-fuel or one of the other zillion "gamer adjacent supplements/food/whatever the gently caress this slop is" products.
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May 31, 2023 12:46
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AceOfFlames posted:Closest to that are probably people sponsored by G-fuel or one of the other zillion "gamer adjacent supplements/food/whatever the gently caress this slop is" products. Now let me tell you how ExpressVPN changed my life.
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May 31, 2023 12:52
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HopperUK posted:The pernicious thing on youtube is people saying 'Not sponsored, not affiliated! But the company did send me all this product for free!' Well then you are affiliated, aren't you, really. Because if you trash the stuff they'll probably stop sending you product for free. Nerdecrafter is bad like this. This actually happened in the emulator handheld world recently, Taki Udon had announced a giveaway sponsored by Jsaux but posted a critical video of one of their things and they pulled the sponsorship. I don't mind people getting review units for free, I don't expect people to spend hundreds a month buying stuff for review. What's grinding my teeth in that space now though is one of the big popular handheld reviewers posting reviews that say they're not sponsored but also have custom discount codes to buy the device, which I believe is literally in one of the sets of regulations for what constitutes an ad on Youtube. Natural 20 posted:Like in a perfect world you'd want someone reviewing whose cash comes from stuff almost completely orthogonal to games in general. But I've not found anyone who's managed to make "Reviewing videogames but advertising an accounting system" work just yet. This was the thing with Giant Bomb and the ads they ran on the Bombcast, those ads were very explicitly never videogame related. I believe both Nextlander and Jeff Gerstmann have continued that practice with their Patreon podcasts.
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May 31, 2023 13:02
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HopperUK posted:The pernicious thing on youtube is people saying 'Not sponsored, not affiliated! But the company did send me all this product for free!' Well then you are affiliated, aren't you, really. Because if you trash the stuff they'll probably stop sending you product for free. Nerdecrafter is bad like this. I mean, sometimes publishers just send you free games without needing to ask. Or if you’re intended to review it you’ll ask for a code and they’ll send you one.
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May 31, 2023 13:14
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njsykora posted:This was the thing with Giant Bomb and the ads they ran on the Bombcast, those ads were very explicitly never videogame related. I believe both Nextlander and Jeff Gerstmann have continued that practice with their Patreon podcasts. I will never forget that one ad Gerstmann read for a special by comedian whose name I don't remember where he was clearly instructed to read the ad as written and not do the usual funny bit. Him saying the sentence "He's the sort of guy to eat Chick-fil-A on a Sunday!" sounding like he wanted to murder-suicide the entire audience will forever haunt my dreams.
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May 31, 2023 14:08
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AceOfFlames posted:I will never forget that one ad Gerstmann read for a special by comedian whose name I don't remember where he was clearly instructed to read the ad as written and not do the usual funny bit. Him saying the sentence "He's the sort of guy to eat Chick-fil-A on a Sunday!" sounding like he wanted to murder-suicide the entire audience will forever haunt my dreams. As a fan of his work I would really like to hear this do you recall when it happened by any chance?
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May 31, 2023 16:15
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Chasiubao posted:As a fan of his work I would really like to hear this do you recall when it happened by any chance? I have a reading in my head and I don't want to spoil it with the real one because what I have right now is really funny
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May 31, 2023 16:39
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Chasiubao posted:As a fan of his work I would really like to hear this do you recall when it happened by any chance? Somehow by sheer luck (i.e. just going on Spotify, picking an episode from vaguely the time I listened to the show, and working backwards listening to the first few seconds), I have found it: https://www.giantbomb.com/shows/giant-bombcast-03-10-2015/2970-16628/free-podcast
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May 31, 2023 16:41
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njsykora posted:On the games media I remember a writer for Official Nintendo Magazine UK telling a story about how he was told he had to give a good score to a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game, but they didn't care about the text of the review. So he wrote this brutally negative review but just slapped an 85% at the end and no-one cared because it's all about maintaining that Metacritic average. You see this with people raging about outlier reviews where the line is "You just want to ruin the metascore". This is becoming a kind of trend, where reading the actual review text things like 'unpolished, full of bugs, stale writing, etc' you'd think it was a borderline unfinished game and then it gets a score of 8.5/10. Whether or not that was editor mandated or someone being a lovely reviewer is up for debate. It's coming down to the number worship being prized above all and that the reading of the actual text absent any score would lead the layperson to give it a much lower score in their head. I also have to think that most of the established companies hire tons of 'consultants' reviewers and pay them in peanuts+exposure without any care about the quality of their work because otherwise how do you explain that Nintendo review guy at IGN who's entire tenure was pretty much blatant plagiarism in the few months he was on staff.
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May 31, 2023 17:14
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angry video game nerd, sponsored by genshin impact
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May 31, 2023 17:20
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i forget who but i remember a youtuber mentioning that he got sent an ad offer by raid shadow legends, said no, got sent another like a week later, didnt say anything, got sent another a couple weeks later, said no and to stop sending him offers, got sent an ad offer a week later, sent them goatse, and then got sent another ad offer
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May 31, 2023 17:21
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Endorph posted:i forget who but i remember a youtuber mentioning that he got sent an ad offer by raid shadow legends, said no, got sent another like a week later, didnt say anything, got sent another a couple weeks later, said no and to stop sending him offers, got sent an ad offer a week later, sent them goatse, and then got sent another ad offer I know exactly who you're talking about and I genuinely cannot remember the name of the YouTuber. Mobile games as a whole are a fascinating topic to me, and while it'll never happen I'd desperately love to see statistics on marketing strategies and # of emails sent out to fish for sponsors.
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May 31, 2023 17:27
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Raid Shadow Legends is special even among mobile games. Like all of them (summoner's war, cookie run, mihoyoverse, etc) do it but RSL just does not pay attention to what you say about the game and offers tons more money than anyone.
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May 31, 2023 17:30
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Reviewers are always gonna get caught in perverse incentives if their content is primarily about exclusive access or timely reviews. The “decent” YouTube journalism I was talking about are videos not caught up in that web — retrospectives, deep dives, video essays. There’s plenty of content like that on YouTube. It’s arguably healthier for us all if we aren’t plumping for the creator with the exclusive access and earliest review.
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May 31, 2023 17:35
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https://twitter.com/toadsanime/status/1663929004187951106?s=61&t=-vp9P7i8Kl2W3uKiLPEWrA
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May 31, 2023 17:37
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Kotick made 480 million dollars out of thin air when he conned 12 of his acquaintances into buying into the overwatch league. 480 million dollars and in exchange he gave them absolutely nothing. I cant think of a better/worse deal in the history of business. I guess thats why the board still seems to like him despite being the world's easiest scapegoat. Ofc thats not the kind of thing you can brag about publicly.
No Wave fucked around with this message at 17:43 on May 31, 2023 |
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May 31, 2023 17:40
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