What's fueling the distrust for game journalists?

[CChaos]

The problem is many fold and goes in numerous directions, really.

First, there's exclusive games. A Playstation, Nintendo or MS affiliated magazine is ALWAYS going to offer up a good review to the console that it's on. If the other reviews are middling or low, who do you believe on whether the game is actually good or not when the spin is in full swing?

Second, corporate money. The bigger the site, the more money they need coming in to be able to keep their lights on. The examples in the OP are a great example of what happens when a reviewer doesn't toe the company line when money is on the line.

Third, debacles like 2K, Gearbox and Duke Nukem Forever. Their PR guys openly stated, with some amount of anger, that the groups who were giving DNF bad reviews were risking their future opportunities for review copies of games. It's one of those dirty little secrets that people expect and reduces honesty in the reviewers.

Fourth, reviewer opinion and mismatched genre preference. Rol just stated previously that someone who does not like a specific type of game should not be doing the reviewing. The problem with that is one has no idea if the guy who's giving out the assignments knows or even gives a shit about who is reviewing what. Thus, you could have an overly negative review. On the other hand, someone who likes the genre excessively might ignore the faults and prop up the game all the same. To put it bluntly, reviewers are damned if they do, damned if they don't because you can't completely trust opinions of people who may be either pissy about the genre or are wearing rose coloured glasses.

Fifth, fanboyism. Even critics can be fanboys and it makes it extremely difficult to get an accurate portrayal out of them when they're reviewing a game series that, say, they grew up with and refuse to say anything bad about. You can usually tell which critics these are by the absolutely fawning way things are alluded to in the game by the reviewer.

I'm sure there are even more points than this, but what it amounts to is a cluster of crap that, together, ends up making the entire review industry totally unreliable. The only way you can actually form a reasonable opinion about the game by reviewers these days is if you cross reference all of the reviews and see which things are mentioned amongst them all (bad FPS, lag, bad graphics, etc). Otherwise, they don't do much for people. This is why things like Metacritic, which is okay and kind of useful, shouldn't really be used as an overly important gauge (especially by companies).

Basically? I suppose the problem with game 'journalism' is one indelible fact: there is no such thing as an unbiased opinion in an industry where emotions run as high as they do in gaming and where money often comes from the pocketbooks of the companies that you may just review a bad game for.