Gamespot pulls Savage review

Games
41

Can we all agree, then, that somewhere between 5 and 80 hours is acceptable?

Heaven knows, I would not trust one reviewer, regardless. It depends on the type of game, that reviewer’s history, turn-offs, turn-ons, N*Sync or Backstreet, girth, etc. It’s just one opinion, but usually one that has experience in the biz to back it up, knows what to look for in a game and how to present all of it in a nice, tidy review. Once a reviewer burns me with what I perceive as a shoddy review, however, his credibility is gone forever.

42

Yep. Think about it - a publication like Gamespy pays $100 for a review. It takes 60+ hours to finish BG2, or 100+ hours to finish Morrowind, and explore diffferent aspects of the game/different classes, etc. Online publications now almost never give reviewers more than a week with a game, so in order to thoroughly play those types of games in that timetable, you’d have to work 100 hour weeks (including time to write the review) and if you never took a day’s vacation, you’d make a whopping $5200 a year.

So you’ll never get full time, “professional” game writers spending that sort of time on a review – as Jacub indicated, they’d go insane and broke. I do spend that sort of time on my reviews, and have always finished every game I’ve reviewed, but I’m more of an insane fanatic who sometimes writes about gaming - not a full-time gaming writer.

Uh, that all said, Scotty’s response was pretty lame.

43

100 bucks? That’s it? That sucks.

44

Wait! Hold on. 100 bucks plus the game. Changes things, doesn’t it. Now who wouldn’t jump at the chance to be a reviewer.

45

Ok, after some careful thought, I guess I’d want to earn 20 bucks an hour, or, because it the greatest job in the world, 15. At 15 bucks an our, Osborne owed Gamespot 6.7 hours of review/writing time. I suppose some reviewers would split that 50/50 between the 2. Bottom line, 100 bucks isn’t enough.

edit: I don’t know how much a mag/site should pay, but the more the better.

46

Wait! Hold on. 100 bucks plus the game. Changes things, doesn’t it. Now who wouldn’t jump at the chance to be a reviewer.[/quote]

Ha ha – if it’s a shitty game, it sucks to play it though. Believe me, I no longer get excited about bargain bin games because I know that my time is worth more to me than getting a game for $5 if the game sucks. The game could be $0.50 and I won’t get it if I don’t think I really want to play it. For example, I won’t get Empire of Magic even for $0.99.

The magazines pay better, btw. Gamespot pays more than $100 also, I believe.

47

I paid my money
and I’m gonna see all the movie
And it’s gonna be good
I’m telling you people it’s gonna be good
cause I paid my money, I paid my money
Bring it on, yeah
I see people leaving early, they don’t know what they’re missing
They don’t know what they’re missing
They’re missing half the movie
And I’ll not be screwed,
I’ll not be screwed like the people leaving early
Cause I paid my money, I paid my money.

-- Fear of Pop[/quote]

I think this is the same instinct that makes buffets so popular with people. Blech.

48

Wait! Hold on. 100 bucks plus the game.[/quote]

Whee! That’s actually not even true, since other than a couple of exceptions (including TOEE), I’ve bought all of the games I’ve reviewed in the past few years - including two exciting copies of SWG (and one collectors’ edition, heh).

But I agree with what I think is your bottom line: you should only be reviewing if you truly enjoy doing it, and are willing (and able) to put the time in to do a decent job – which I’d define as spending enough time to give potential purchasers enough information to make an informed decision about whether or not to buy the game.

49

OK I’ll accept that it was a crap review, but I’m a little disturbed that Gamespot are pulling critical reviews because a developer complains. I know it’s Gamespot’s call, but in their place I’d have given the developer the same amount of space to reply with a link to their reply from the review.

50

RPGs are the worst. I stopped reviewing them after I reviewed Fallout 2 I think (or was it Icewind Dale?, something like that). I love to play RPGs at my pace, and that is too slow for a review. For games like IWD I had to bust my ass playing the game when I really didn’t want to and expending far more energy than was wise. I don’t do any reviews any more really but I wouldn’t review an RPG for any amount of money–it isn’t any fun for me.

51

I am not entirely sure, but I think I was being sarcastic in one or two of my posts. :) My point had something to do with one hundred dolla really not being enough money and getting a free game out of the deal probably won’t make up for it, especially since it could suck ass. (I think that’s how Asher put it)

The times I have attempted reviews have been chores. Partly because my Real Job got in the way, partly because I wanted to do a thorough review and that is friggin’ time consuming, and partly because analysis of the game interfered with my enjoyment. I know it is no ride in the park and you guys who consistently turn out quality reviews have my eternal respect, but if money is changing hands and many people’s hard work is in the balance, each and every game deserves a fair shake. Unless it is Postal II.

52

Haven’t you posted here multiple times that at your Real Job you essentially do nothing, which leaves you free to make thousands of contentless posts to this forum? If so, I am not sure how your Real Job could get in the way of much, except for sleeping.

53

You’re jumping to conclusions here. They didn’t pull a review because the developer complained about a poor score. They pulled it because the dev came up with proof (or maybe-proof, given the whole some-servers-track-stats thing) that the reviewer didn’t put the time into the game that he should have.

Personally, I really think that S2 should have done this quietly. Not for the sake of the reviewer or GameSpot (both would still take a beating for having the article removed), but for the sake of their relations with GameSpot and their own dignity.

54

If what Jakub and Desslock say is true (and I don’t have any reason to doubt them - their reasoning makes perfect sense) then it actually sounds like web sites are worse off hiring full-time gaming journalists because in order to eat, these guys have to write so much that they can’t spend much time with any particular game. This is kind of a paradox because presumably an experienced professional in a field brings some kind of special knowledge to the table, whereas with full-time game writers it’s the very opposite because they can’t afford to spend the time. In fact, if (again) what Jakub says is true, and nobody notices the extra detail and quality, then such writers really add nothing.

I guess the logical conclusion is that full-time game writers actually can’t write that many reviews if they want to stay solvent. Is this same low pay rate the norm for other types of articles? It seems like you could increase your pay/time ratio by doing more previews, which I assume don’t take as long since you’re just describing an unfinished product. How about features?

55

Features can be outright bitches, though sometimes (for print at least, which is what I know mostly) you do get substantially more money. Never “OMG I’m rich!” levels but more than usual. Still, features often require more travel, phone calls, piecing together art, interviews, etc. than you could possibly imagine.

Previews run the gamut from grab the assets disk, the press release and fact sheet, and whip out 300 words in 15 minutes, to several days spent playing a nearly-complete beta build, snapping shots, interviewing the developer, and crafting a cover story. The pay is often more than reviews, if only because the previews are often longer than reviews.

But yeah I’d actually say reviews are the worst dollars to effort ratio in the biz.

56

Quite a dichotomy exists when considering the question of “What is an acceptable review?” First of all there are the writers-attempting-to-make-a-living who simply don’t have 100 hours to play Baldur’s Gate II – Then there are the readers who deserve as complete a picture as possible about the game in question.

In an ideal world reviewers would load up a game, pretend they had paid $59.99 for it, totally ignore the fact that they’ve seen more gaming software in a month than a lot of people see in a decade–push that particular reality right out of their minds. Then, if the game is finite, they should play right through the final cutscene, or it’s like walking out in the middle of a movie, right?

Then, if multiplayer exists, they should try out several multiplayer modes. (If it’s multiplayer-only, then they luck out 'cuz it’s probably not finite.)

Then for RPGs with multiple classes/paths/etc., they should play the whole damn thing over again just in case another choice might make the whole product a lot better/worse than they had initially thought.

This would serve the readership. Then the publishing entity would hand over $5,000 and everyone’s happy, right? Oh. Right. We’re talking about $100.00.

In a lifetime of reading film reviews, only twice in memory did I see a critic admit that he walked out of the theater. They owe it to their readers to stick it out. Why don’t we? Because we can’t afford to… three-and-a-half hours of dreck, raisinets, and popcorn are one thing. Two weeks of scrambling-to-make-a-living are quite another.

So this necessitates that the game-review reader place a whole lot of trust in our first impressions. Are they entitled to more? Sure… probably… but they ain’t gonna get it.

There are reviewers I trust to do a good assessment without finishing the game, or to do a good assessment of a persistant or terminally episodic product based on a “reasonable” number of hours of play. And there are reviewers I wouldn’t, for the life of me, ever trust to convey an “educated opinion” after, say, 5 hours of play.

How long is long enough when it comes to giving the reader a fair shake? I’m not really sure. Depends upon the product/developer rep/cost/hours-it-would-have-taken-to-finish… I dunno. I think S2 should have left well enough alone… Anyone who didn’t trust Osbourne a whole lot would certainly look elsewhere. I know I would.

57

Even if the tool for recording and displaying to players their in-game time was off, they could almost certainly track it on the backend at the log-in authorization level, as well.

58

Blanketgirl, you back my point, I think, that was pretty long so I stopped reading after the thing about critics walking out of movies.

This is not movies being reviewed. You don’t have to play it to the end. It cracks me up to say on one hand; casual gamers, blah blah, need to reach them, they buy the bulk, not niche, blah blah blah. Then demand reviewers write for the hardcore extreme that actually finish every game they buy.

Unless you are writing a review for a flight sim where you know your only audience is hardcore gamers, be general, be quick. If the first 10 hours suck, the game sucks. Why is it that every review has to be for the hardcore gamer? Should the reviewer at CGW reviewing Postal 2 played it all the way thru? Maybe something in the 20th hour would have bumped the score from zero stars to a half star?

Are movie reviews written for other reviewers, other critics? Or the mass population?

For the most part I buy every game I play, I doubt I play half of them past 10 hours. Most of the time I get excited, go out and buy it then realize, oh yeah, I hate this type of game and it is just more of the same. Or the game is like Vietcong where I just don’t want to see another freaking tunnel, so my options are to waste more time and slug thru it, or just turn it off and play something else.

I turn it off. Go sell it on eBay.

Chet

59

Opinions are opinions. If three hours is long enough to form an opinion, fine. Still, when you’re writing something that will influence consumers, seems to me that a reviewer would be under obligation to at least attempt to determine why the game is or is not enjoyable. If the review had been titled “Three Wasted Hours Of My Life That I Can Never Have Back”, it might have made for a good read and bypassed the whole length-of-play debacle.

If this were a standalone single player cRPG, sure, the reviewer should finish, or at least get into the mid-game to determine if the game has any lasting appeal. Online-only games are a different beast entirely. Maybe three hours is a bit short, but how long do you need to play BF1942 or Planetside before you form an opinion on it?

The developer claims that three hours is not enough to explore enough of the game to make an accurate assessment. Maybe they’re correct, but possibly it’s a shortcoming of the game that it doesn’t get interesting until you’ve invested 10 hours of slogging through mundane gameplay. If GameSpot is worried that the review is grossly misrepresentative, then pulling it makes sense. Otherwise, buckling to developers sets a bad precedent.

  • Alan
60

You’re jumping to conclusions here. They didn’t pull a review because the developer complained about a poor score. They pulled it because the dev came up with proof (or maybe-proof, given the whole some-servers-track-stats thing) that the reviewer didn’t put the time into the game that he should have.

[/quote]

But would they have complained if he’d spent the same amount of time and delivered a rave review? As it is I can’t comment on Scott’s review, because I can’t read it, perhaps the game is so bad that it only takes three hours to find out, perhaps it was a vindictive hatchet job, I think it’s best to leave the reader to decide and of course give the developers a right to reply if they feel the game has seriously been misrepresented.