Machina said:
Was gonna say I could've basically copy/pasted this post but I don't agree with the bolded because I believe that this is a very, very rare thing. It's only worthwhile for publishers to even consider doing this with the biggest media publications and even then it doesn't take the form of simple cash exchanges, it's rather stuff like expenses paid trips to some luxury hotel resort to play the game for the weekend, which is what Activision did/does with CoD, or the indirect pressure to deliver a good review in order to continue receiving early copies and preferential access at trade shows and so on. But like I said, I think it's quite rare and only happens with the very biggest publications if at all, certainly not all of those on Metacritic. I think the GTA IV review debacle was an example of herding (in the political polling sense of the word, not the agricultural one); reviewers kind of converged around the view that it was the best thing since sliced bread because they'd fallen for their industry's own hyping of the game and then for reasons which will have varied from reviewer to reviewer they tried to kid themselves that it was amazing when actually it was a let-down. |
Around GTA4 and Halo whatever that time, it was clearly the time of being paid for reviews.
Maybe not "directly" but completely money bought. Go to a website like IGN back in the time those games where reviewed and their entire page was filled with said games advertisements. That is a complete conflict of interest. If said site gives it a bad review, you can bet they will see less ad revenue in future.
It's like the whole accountants and Enron back in the day. Auditors would not give companies bad reports, becuase if they did, the companie would just fire them and hire someone else. That would mean the accounting firm would lose out on a million dollar contract. YOu as an accountatn going to go back to your firm and tell them you lost a billion dollar company because you told them their books didn't match perfectly. They woudl be pissed.
Same for reviewers. You don't think their editors were like "hey why don't you raise this score by 1 or 2. We are getting thousands of dollars from this company in ad revenue. You wanna keep your job."
