wombat123 said:
To be fair, a lot of western publishers are guilty of being too friendly with game reviewers. They give them free stuff that they can sell on eBay, they invite them to parties and make them feel almost obligated to grade their games on some kind of positive curve. Also, publishers can really screw with a publication's advertising revenue if they don't play ball and really piss them off with a bad review. That being said, I recall there were a lot of rumors about Rockstar (or Take-Two) essentially leaning on reviewers to give GTA IV great scores so I wouldn't be surprised if they did the same for GTA V. |
Actually, "swag" of that nature has decreased *heavily* in recent years, likely due to the influx of lawyers into these companies' workings as the industry has grown larger.
Also, major publishers being able to bully reviewers has always been a bit of a weak claim as plenty of reviewers have taken a piss on major releases and been none the worse for it, be it a western published game or a Japanese published game. In fact, one of the most egregious examples of publishers attempting to bully reviewers *has* to be Konami, which black listed all of Destructoid over Jim Sterling's opinion piece on their company.
So it's not a Western issue nor is it a consistent issue.
With regards to GTA, I would say the fanbase moreso than Take-Two is are the ones doing the leaning, as seen when a few reviewers dared to give GTA V a 9 or even - GASP! - an 8.5. In fact, that preorder culture and hype machines are probably the two biggest contributing factors to problemsof this nature.
