I always gave more weight to reader experiences than the journalist and even more weight, obviously, to my own experience.

Generally speaking, the bigger you are, the less easy you are to push around because you're less beholden to any, one, party and, thus, can say what you want with little fear of reprisal (the sheer size means that advertisers will contineu with you because of that size, regardless of the drubbing their products migh ttake--after all, it's about eyeballs for the marketing dept.)

The little guys, on the other hand, are not in the position to lose revenue because losing one can mean the difference between publish or perish, which I can both assure and promise you, from personal experience, and the advertisers *know* this.*

This pretty much holds true or any form of media, whether it be IGN, CNN, or the NYT...or at least it should, but it, allegedly, isn't in IGN's case, but that might be because they can't make any money these days.

*We had one *nakedly* demanding we start upgrading their scores or they'd pull their ads--the threat wasn't implicit, it was explict.

................................... LOL, this was obvious to most of us for some time now. I now want to laugh in the face of all those people who once mocked me and others for saying some reviews seem to peddle to a certain audience, while totally undermining another. Not pointing any fingers or elbows tho.......

any one who lets a review score dictate their gaming decisions is a not very smart anyways.

I find this more likely than the PR theory. Whatever the cause, there is something suspicious about review scores, hence, the reason I generally don't trust them.

That's assuming a company doesn't want to play ball. A lot of the biggest gaming websites are owned by large media conglomerates. IGN is owned by Newscorp, for instance, which isn't a company known for ethical journalism. When news is about the bottom line, most companies won't have any issue with taking some extra advertising dollars for a higher score. A website like this one is independently owned and doesn't have anywhere near the amount of pull that a website like IGN or GameStop has.

Exactly why I've been using my own tastes, game play videos, and sometimes word of mouth in place of reviews. Oblivion was the last straw for me, when it came to buying a game based on high review scores.

Yeah, seemed like it especially for company specific magazines like nintendogamer and OPSM. Just gotta go with what you like and then take chances on new ips.

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I think the word you're looking for, in this context, is corrupt; unless you don't have the stones to call it what it is.

This site's been accused of the same. It's a major problem when you have publications that are highly reliant for revenue on advertising the products they are reviewing.

The reviews that are more likely to be a true reflection of the reviewer's opinion are those found in publications that rely very little, or none, on gaming industry advertising revenue, like general news websites that have a resident game reviewer. Like the Sydney Morning Herald. Doesn't mean their opinions are any good, but just less likely to have been bought

review scores work pretty good for me if it is about reviews with high scores, i really never bought a game with a high metascore which i thought is not really good. only problem is that i sometimes find not so good games better as reviews say but i really liked all my games with a high metascore so maybe people who pay magazines have exactly my taste hell yeah!

i have one exeption this gen, i thought farcry 2 was terrible and it had a decent score.