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In Defence of Videogame Reviewers (Articles)

Mr Media Coverage over at GameDaily.biz has posted an interesting article on why game developers hate game reviewers. The article references comments from a reviewer who became a game developer. Having read the article, I feel I need to write my own responses from the point of view of of someone who went the other way.

I started reviewing games for PC Gaming World and Gamespot way back in 1998, but long before that I was a programmer. During my University days I worked as an Industrial Automation programmer, developing real-time control systems for heavy industry, and programmed simple games in my spare time.

In the world of video game reviewing, deadlines are everything. For a print magazine, if you miss the print deadline, that's it - your review is not printed as nothing can hold the presses or the magazines just won't be printed and distributed in time, so if you receive a game title the day before print deadline for that month, that's how long you have to play the game and write the review.

In the world of online reviewing, the deadline is usually the game's release dat, or preferably a few days beforehand. Having given up on the print work many years ago, let's have a quick look at the process of reviewing a game for news0r.

The first step is to get a pre-release copy of the game. Simple you might say, however more often than not pre-release code is not made available until the final game has 'gone gold', and even then you may not receive code until the day of release, if you're very lucky. One apocryphal example saw review code for a game delivered by the publisher's PR Agency six (6) weeks(!) afte the game hit retail. Needless to say we'd already bought the game long before the official review code turned up.

Over the past few years it seems that review code has been getting harder and harder to get, and arriving later than ever, leaving websites with little or no time to play a game and write a review before the game's released or another site gets their own review published - degrading the value to your readers of your own review. At the same time there are more sites that are clamouring for early release code, also making it more difficult to get reviewable game code prior to release.

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