Gamingvogue: Ah, controversies, don’t people love them? A few days ago an article appeared where, Robert Florence–Scottish comedian and games writer–exposed how games journalists were behaving in inappropriate ways, in a hard-hitting piece that was quite certainly an excellent read.
Controversy and probable blacklisting in the name of giving clarity to our readers. Wesley Copeland explains how VGI works behind closed doors and discusses how the PR world works for indie gaming website, Video Games Interactive.
Eurogamer Editor Tom Bramwell has finally broken his silence over the controversy surrounding Robert Florence’s last article for the site, the resultant fallout and Florence’s subsequent decision to leave – explaining that journalist Lauren Wainwright threatened libel action and that many people in the industry “screamed” at him over the decision to publish the article.
"I want to apologise to Eurogamer's readers for not saying anything else about why I edited Rab Florence's column last week until now. There are a bunch of reasons why I've not said anything. One is that removing paragraphs from Rab's column is the most depressing thing I've had to do in five years of editing the site and I still haven't gotten over it. Another is that the emotion of the moment was much too raw for useful analysis and introspection. And the last reason is that I hoped the column still spoke for itself."
When IGN have both Twisted Metal and Starhawk 9's out of 10 and The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition 8.5 I stopped believing in games journalism or at least IGN's partiality.
That's a misleading headline. When you read the article, the journalist was promoting a contest that gave away free PS3s, but in the SAME article they mention the fact that MS gave away free 360s (we all remember that). So, shouldn't that headline be 'Games Journalism: Of libel and free 360s'? It's a really odd (telling) choice of headline considering Microsoft gave free 360s to the press and Sony just had their contest promoted. Which of these scenarios are more likely to effect journalism; presumably the point of the article?
"People mock gaming journalists; they call us corrupt; they call us unethical; they see the ads everywhere and call us sell-outs, and that view cannot be changed anytime soon particularly when things like these happen. People tend to scrutinize everything a lot closely when such controversies erupt and the side effects of that are irreversible."
When people disagree with you, they'll call you every name in the book. Give a game a bad review? You're a hack, obviously biased against it and an idiot. Give a game a great review? You're a sell-out. Can't win some days.
It's not a secret journalists get free stuff for positive reviews.
Don't forget when the 360 slim was revealed at E3, every journalist in the audience got a free one and it just so happened to receive amazing reviews despite still having an overpriced proprietary harddrive and no Bluray for movie watching.