| ItsaMii said: Look at this taken from thewiikly.com: Alas, Microsoft - Why Microsoft will leave the console market by Sean Malstrom Page 8 of 11 Marketing and Game Journalism Gamers often ask themselves about the strange reporting seen in many game magazines. You hear so much attention and hype given to a game. Once the game comes out, you hear very little about it. The next game becomes hyped. It is very curious as the gamers would like more information and less hype. Yet, all we get is hype. What is going on? Why are the customers not being served? The answer is because the reader is not the customer. Rather, the customer is the PRODUCT. The customers are the game companies. They put in the ads and supply the content. The purpose of a game magazine is not to deliver news to you. Rather, the purpose is to deliver you to the game companies. An anonymous individual revealed: I had a brief stint as a journalist in the industry, and there are no ethics whatsoever. Here are just a few of my experiences: • Had my scores raised when I scored something "too low". (I could only score something "too low" for a major company, usually one who was a big advertiser.) • Never had my scores lowered. There was no such thing as too high a score. • Editors will say that PR people do not control content. Not directly, no, but there is an unwritten rule that the editors have to make the PR people happy. • Editors will say there is no conflict of interest in going to a big gaming PR event (such as flying an F-16 or racing an F-1 car) because they always hand the game review off to a freelancer in these cases. But since the freelancer's scores are raised and lowered at will, that doesn't mean much, does it? • PR people say that holding events like letting game journalists fly F-16s allows them to review the game by comparing the experiences. Since this review is a complete conflict of interest, it usually goes to a freelancer...who didn't get to fly in an F-16. • Some PR people have taken game journalists to strip clubs and on some occasions, purchased prostitutes for them. • VERY FEW of the game "journalists" in the industry have journalism backgrounds and practically none of them have any ethics when it comes to their jobs and serving the reader's interest. They all say they do, but their actions are different. When Ubisoft holds a PR event in Hawaii and allows the staff of IGN to invite their wives and/or girlfriends, the end reader never gets to hear about that. And it's not on IGN's dime at all. • Therefore, you can never, ever trust a game review you read from a major publisher. And if they are starting to penetrate blogs, that's quite disheartening, as you never know if that's the person's real opinion or not. Sad. You say, “Doesn’t this go on in every industry?” No. But even if it did, why do we tolerate bought-and-paid-for journalism? |
Sean Malstrom obviously has no clue how Microsoft works. If Microsoft listened to the Sean Malstroms of the World there'd be no Microsoft Server or Microsoft Office or Microsoft Sql Server or any of the others now very profitable markets they got into where they lost money and had naysayers at the start. Hell I could see Sean Malstrom telling Apple not to release the Ipod because some of their past attempts at hardware that weren't mac related failed horribly. He obviously looks at the short term and doesn't see the long term otherwise he'd see it's ridiculous to think Microsoft would give up now when their efforts are finally starting to pay off.
As for that "anonymous individual" I don't trust the words of anyone who hides in anonymity and doesn't have the guts to come forward with his real identity and defend his claims. For all we know he could just be a fanboy who's never even been a game journalist.
