I’m still mad at Trotter about that Ascendancy review.
Without wanting to be an “arrogant, pompous windbag” about it, I was a stickler on this issue during my time as PC Gamer’s editor-in-chief. We did not let people preview/review games in genres where they were getting paid by developers for any kind of work.
It wasn’t our readers I was concerned about upsetting – it was rival developers. For readers who already know and trust you, it’s a non-issue. For readers, disclosure is the inoculation.
But disclosure is not going to do much to placate a developer who feels he got reviewed (negatively) by a direct competitor. The more I considered it, the more unfair it seemed to me that we would ever put a developer in that kind of spot. It was a tough square to circle, so my policy was to nip it in the bud.
I assigned the review to Tom Chick because he is one of the very best writers in this business and is an expert on this particular genre. And his professionalism and integrity are unassailable. Why wouldn’t an editor assign a game review to Tom Chick? As the posts just above mine indicate, in other fields, such as book reviews, this kind of thing is done all the time. And even if it hadn’t been, I still just don’t see the problem. It’s still a non-issue to me. As far as this public conversation goes, I’m all for it. I don’t think it makes anyone look bad except the developers, who clearly have an obnoxious, self-righteous thing going here, and lack the grace to just take their negative review to heart, listen to the obviously justified criticisms, and move on.
As far as “disclosure” goes: Huh? Disclosure for what? That he knows what he’s talking about because he has some real experience in the field he’s writing about, as opposed to just being another blowhard with a pen? (I include myself in the latter category.) The idea that I would put something in the article like “In the interests of full disclosure, Tom Chick wrote a manual for a game in the same genre months ago” is ludicrous to me. And, again, especially when we’re talking about a professional like Tom.
If I wrote a public (and negative) review of your magazine, Jeff, you’d be sore about it and you’d have every right to be. You wouldn’t be complimenting my “unassailable” professionalism and experience as a games-magazine editor.
The problem here is that it’s always a blurry line between a non-issue and a conflict of interest.
As a dues-paying member of ASME, you’ve ostensibly agreed to honor this statement: “Avoid all conflicts of interest as well as any appearances of such conflicts.”
Agree or disagree with Cirulis’ objections, but they are not irrational. The situation may not be so clear-cut as Trotter’s Folly, but I’d invite you to take a poll of developers and ask them if they approve or disapprove of their genre-competitors’ strategy-guide writers reviewing their games. I’ll bet you $100 on the outcome of the poll.
Well, I’d be concerned about that if strategy guide writers didn’t cross-team. Most of the writers of DAOC’s strategy guides also wrote the EQ2 strategy guide. I didn’t think less of them, and I assure you I kept all criticism of DAOC in a small firepit within my heart that kept me warm on cold nights. If one of them turned around and wrote a negative review? With disclosure I’d be fine with that (grumbly but fine).
Now, if, say, Brad McQuaid (EQ/Vanguard developer) was paid to write a negative review of an MMO I was working on for a magazine? I’d be unhappy.
And yet you still participate weekly in the PC Gamer podcast although you are on “the other side of the house” now in marketing IIRC. This potential conflict of interest was even brought up IIRC but ultimately dismissed based on a web poll and the assurances that readers/listeners know that Dan is a stand-up guy and would never compromise his integrity or something equally wishy-washy.
I would think anyone who was as hard-nosed on this issue as you claim to be would excuse yourself entirely from the editorial side of things at PCG.
The literary book world is full of a lot of petty backbiting. There normally isn’t a lot of money involved since literary works don’t sell all that well, but there are certainly feuds that develop. Anyway, for books of artistic or scholarly merit, it is often a peer review system. Game reviews are consumer reviews. I don’t think it’s a good analogy to compare the two.
But Stardock and Kerberos’ relationship to each other isn’t the same as Gamer vs. CGW, or Future vs. Ziff. The comparison is specious. Especially since Tom Chick is not an employee of Stardock. He’s a freelance writer. So it wouldn’t be like you writing a negative review of my magazine, Dan. It would be like, say, Steve Klett writing a negative review of my magazine. In which case, I wouldn’t give a shit. And if he had good criticisms, then hopefully I would hear what he had to say, too.
But thanks for quoting ASME to me. Good grief.
but there are certainly feuds that develop.
I still want to see that Dick Cavett episode where Gore Vidal punches Norman Mailer. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Or maybe I just imagined the whole thing.
Yeah, I think it’s absurd to consider Tom a “direct competitor.” Or any sort of competitor. Even if we were to hypothetically assume that he lacks any professional ethics at all, what would he possibly have to gain by badmouthing Sword of the Stars? You can’t have a conflict of interest without having, you know, the interest part.
Do you get royalties for every copy of GalCiv2 sold? If not, why would there be a conflict of interest? If so, shame on you.
What do you mean by “genre”? Like, if someone wrote the manual for GalCiv2, are they disqualified from other sci-fi games? Or do you mean they’re disqualified from other strategy games? Or just 4X games? It seems like, particularly in a relatively specialized industry like games writing, that would be impossible (and unreasonable) to expect.
Remember, though, that it doesn’t have to mean just financial interest. For example, if Tom always felt extra warm-and-fuzzy about GalCiv2 since he has a personal connection to it (which I understand is not the case, but hypothetically), he might be inclined to look down on competing games, or at least be motivated to keep them at or below the level of GalCiv2. You wouldn’t expect Tom to review a game designed by his sister, even though he has no financial interest there.
I can’t agree more with Tom on the review.
I usually don’t pass on a Space RTS, but the demo interface was simply awful, not just the turn-based portion, but the space combat as well. It’s hard to comprehend how they went from Cataclysm to SotS. I re-installed Homeworld 2 and was struck by how much more fun I was actually having. SotS was just a frustrating dot-picking exercise. Sad to say, there was little in the release version which suggested that things had substantially improved.
Oh, for another Relic space RTS.
This stuff is already blurred so much already just on this forum where you’ve got a lot of industry writers along with game devs who seem pretty friendly with one another. Certainly the issue with SotS and Tom isn’t any more of a conflict of interest than the interactions here.
According to TFA, it was a flat fee with no royalties involved.
Man, I used to love Martin’s columns as a kid as the years leading up to that era of CGW were my formative PC gaming years. I emailed the guy gushing a few times.
What an asshole.
Tom, you’re my new crush now!
To derail slightly – I like RPG Codex. :)
What do you mean by “genre”? Like, if someone wrote the manual for GalCiv2, are they disqualified from other sci-fi games? Or do you mean they’re disqualified from other strategy games? Or just 4X games?
My policy was to disqualify the writer from the genre, period. If you were doing scriptwriting for an RTS developer, you didn’t write about RTS games, for instance.
I think it’s absurd to consider Tom a “direct competitor.” Or any sort of competitor.
Like I said – take a poll of developers. I will bet you on the outcome. (If you take a poll of indie developers, I’ll double my wager.)
The universe of indie-space-conquest sims is – how shall one say? – not a large one. In a market like that, where small shops compete for a hardscrabble existence in a relatively tiny pool of customers, stuff like this counts. I wouldn’t have one of Clay “Baseball Mogul” Dreslough’s contractors reviewing Out of the Park Baseball. These are micro-markets, and these companies are competitors.
Developers – particularly indie shops – need to feel they got a fair shake from a magazine they’re relying heavily on for reviews.
If you think Cirulis is the only indie developer who has complained about exactly this kind of thing, you’re wrong – I heard a variation of this numerous times from eagle-eyed developers who had rational (if debatable) reasons for suspecting they were about to be slagged under less-than-fair conditions. At first, I blew off these concerns as paranoia. But I realized I had an easy fix: make sure the games were reviewed by people with zero stake in that market.
The comparison is specious. Especially since Tom Chick is not an employee of Stardock. He’s a freelance writer.
When Tom writes Stardock’s guides for free, then it will be a specious comparison.
As for the PCG Podcast – I don’t review anything there, nor do I review anything in the magazine. Likewise, Gary Whitta, our Backspace columnist, writes for game developers but he doesn’t review anything. Opinion columns are one thing…though even there, we list disclosures. (And my ejection poll was nothing if not the Mother of All Disclosures.) But here we are talking about CGW’s official statement on a game. It’s the review.
Okay here’s where I jump in to defend the game. Have you gotten the latest patch Destarius? It included a lot of improvements to both the strategic and tactical UI. Specifically the dynamic cursor, ship highlight chevrons, and targeting icon might help your dot-picking problems.
As far as the main discussion of this thread is concerned: I’m glad Tom and Jeff took the time to explain their positions and reassure us that the review was unbiased and within policy. I don’t think freelancers should be restricted in what they can or cannot review in these kinds of situations, but I also don’t think disclosing those affiliations is a bad thing. But I’m not an industry guy I just administer a fan wiki (for SotS) and post on this board so maybe I’m off base here.