Gamespot reviewers, and not finishing games.

[Sullla]

Here's the key line from that depressing article:

It's not the optimal situation, but reviewing games is a business.

A business. Keep that in mind the next time you read a "review": the point is not to evaluate the quality of the game in question. The point of the review is to 1) make money for the reviewer's website/magazine and 2) hype the game in question so that the reader will buy it. Leaving aside shovelware games or those from unknown publishers, nearly every review is positive these days to try and get the reader to buy the game. We've essentially reached the Famitsu model of scoring, where games get whatever score the hype and fanbase seems to want them to get. I just wish more people would realize this, instead of thinking that there's anything objective about review scores!

More fun quotes:

"Since story and characterization are such an integral part of the RPG experience, they're games that usually demand being played to completion in order to be discussed with any authority...It's just not time- or cost-effective."

That line should put to rest any doubts that reviews are about anything other than making money.

Still, some reviewers argue that there's no reason for a reviewer to finish a game when most readers aren't going to complete it either. "The last figures I saw for Half-Life 2: Episode 1 said that only 50 percent of the people who bought it completed it," says Gillen. "And that's on a game which lasted four hours. Even for the increasingly common six to ten hour games, you wouldn't expect a completion rate [that's] any higher, let alone the 80 hour RPG epics. Hell, failure to complete [a game] doesn't even mean that a player dislikes the game--they can get distracted and move onto other things, but still love their time with the game."

Disgraceful and embarassing. It's this man's JOB to review games! You cannot simply say, "well, a lot of people won't make it to the end, so I don't have to." You would be fired for work this shoddy in virtually any other field. But I guess it's par for the course when it comes to "gaming journalism".