Agreed. Gaming Journalism has been notorious forever, and a lot of it was just "journalists" supporting corporate hype. On rare occasions there were people with a sense of ethics, and sometimes even whole publications. The meme of "IGN pumped up their scores" was an issue I could explain to you back in 2006. But I was glad to hear that the staff that would eventually make-up the staff of Giant Bomb basically quit after Jeff Gerstmann was fired for giving an honest review of Kane & Lynch.
By the time shit started to get out of control in 2012, Access Journalism had become such a problem that effectively nothing could be trusted. Technology played a huge role in this as Games Journalism switched form print media, to websites, to video reviews.
Print Media had long become utter trash, and when GameSpot came out with user-reviews and a massive review database, it was a real god-send to get a ton of useful information, readily on hand, even if a game took years to release, you could watch how it changed and how people felt about it.
This was important because demos had been effectively banned for years. There was a short span when you had only print media and no videos to allow you to guess at whether your $60 game was even playable or not. A lot of Games Journalists took advantage of it.
However, once people started figuring out how to upload play-throughs when YouTube finally allowed videos over 10 minutes back in 2010. Then suddenly the problems that Games Journalism had been having for 15 years, worsened even for the online sites. For a long time, people had been saying that print Games Media was on the way out, and Play Magazine and Nintendo Power was evidence that the print magazines couldn't rely on game reviews like they had for the past 20 years. Gaming Websites now had to compete with online forums and YouTubers doing play-throughs basically for free and it totally undercut them.
Game Journalism had been shit for a long time, but once technology and cheap competition started to threaten their power, they needed something to hold on to the gate-keeping position they had crafted for themselves. Add Gerstmann's firing from GameSpot and how they rapidly declined in quality, and it marked the end of the Game Journalism website era, but nobody knew it yet.
When a bunch of autists on 8chan (if you all remember) threatened to expose their cronyism, they brought the knives out. They mixed that in with using political agitation and balkanization to try and cultivate an audience of Leftist mental slaves who wouldn't switch to their competitors on YouTube due to ideological possession, and it didn't really work.
Now... God in heaven... nearly 7 years on, they've learned nothing and are still just basically going through the motions like it's 2012-2013. Even the publishers are struggling to see use in them when Livestreamers and YouTubers have become far more useful as a consumer research device and as an easier method to access attention. You don't need a journalist being paid 75k a year to write you a fluff piece, when you can promise that weird superfan super-secret-inside-access and he'll be just as propagandistic about the product he obsesses over. It's easy to win-over hard-core fans with minimal efforts at placating them.
The best consumer advocates won't ever get invited, but then they still get supported by consumers anyway at this point. The point of Games Journalism is basically gone at this point. Publishers have better shills, Consumers have better reviewers, and everybody has their niche except ideologically possessed over-paid midwits who are still trapped in 2012.
It’s interesting how demos have been making a comeback recently, not for massive ea titles, but on switch they are everywhere. Demos were a way for a company to show off what makes their game special, and garner sales based off that.
Arch is probably right that refund policies are probably part of that.
But I also think that Demos might be additionally useful nowadays for exploiting "viral" marketing and driving up decentralized hype.
We'll still get the problems of demos not being what's in the game, but a well crafted presentation to a potential consumer is clearly useful in the age of high-speed sharing of information.
Agreed. Gaming Journalism has been notorious forever, and a lot of it was just "journalists" supporting corporate hype. On rare occasions there were people with a sense of ethics, and sometimes even whole publications. The meme of "IGN pumped up their scores" was an issue I could explain to you back in 2006. But I was glad to hear that the staff that would eventually make-up the staff of Giant Bomb basically quit after Jeff Gerstmann was fired for giving an honest review of Kane & Lynch.
By the time shit started to get out of control in 2012, Access Journalism had become such a problem that effectively nothing could be trusted. Technology played a huge role in this as Games Journalism switched form print media, to websites, to video reviews.
Print Media had long become utter trash, and when GameSpot came out with user-reviews and a massive review database, it was a real god-send to get a ton of useful information, readily on hand, even if a game took years to release, you could watch how it changed and how people felt about it.
This was important because demos had been effectively banned for years. There was a short span when you had only print media and no videos to allow you to guess at whether your $60 game was even playable or not. A lot of Games Journalists took advantage of it.
However, once people started figuring out how to upload play-throughs when YouTube finally allowed videos over 10 minutes back in 2010. Then suddenly the problems that Games Journalism had been having for 15 years, worsened even for the online sites. For a long time, people had been saying that print Games Media was on the way out, and Play Magazine and Nintendo Power was evidence that the print magazines couldn't rely on game reviews like they had for the past 20 years. Gaming Websites now had to compete with online forums and YouTubers doing play-throughs basically for free and it totally undercut them.
Game Journalism had been shit for a long time, but once technology and cheap competition started to threaten their power, they needed something to hold on to the gate-keeping position they had crafted for themselves. Add Gerstmann's firing from GameSpot and how they rapidly declined in quality, and it marked the end of the Game Journalism website era, but nobody knew it yet.
When a bunch of autists on 8chan (if you all remember) threatened to expose their cronyism, they brought the knives out. They mixed that in with using political agitation and balkanization to try and cultivate an audience of Leftist mental slaves who wouldn't switch to their competitors on YouTube due to ideological possession, and it didn't really work.
Now... God in heaven... nearly 7 years on, they've learned nothing and are still just basically going through the motions like it's 2012-2013. Even the publishers are struggling to see use in them when Livestreamers and YouTubers have become far more useful as a consumer research device and as an easier method to access attention. You don't need a journalist being paid 75k a year to write you a fluff piece, when you can promise that weird superfan super-secret-inside-access and he'll be just as propagandistic about the product he obsesses over. It's easy to win-over hard-core fans with minimal efforts at placating them.
The best consumer advocates won't ever get invited, but then they still get supported by consumers anyway at this point. The point of Games Journalism is basically gone at this point. Publishers have better shills, Consumers have better reviewers, and everybody has their niche except ideologically possessed over-paid midwits who are still trapped in 2012.
It’s interesting how demos have been making a comeback recently, not for massive ea titles, but on switch they are everywhere. Demos were a way for a company to show off what makes their game special, and garner sales based off that.
Arch is probably right that refund policies are probably part of that.
But I also think that Demos might be additionally useful nowadays for exploiting "viral" marketing and driving up decentralized hype.
We'll still get the problems of demos not being what's in the game, but a well crafted presentation to a potential consumer is clearly useful in the age of high-speed sharing of information.