DSOGaming

It seems that this week’s “SimCity” story will be dedicated to Bioshock: Infinite. In an awkward turn of events, 2K Games allowed IGN to break its review embargo for Irrational Games’ upcoming title and post a ‘in-progress’ review of it. Naturally, this exclusivity frustrated a lot of video-game journalists. In those frustrated journalists we can even find Geoff Keighley and Polygon’s Arthur Gies.  

Spotted by NeoGAF’s member “unbias” the following tweet feeds show some really annoyed journalists. As most of you already know, this ‘exclusivity’ thing needs to stop, however we can’t see that happening anytime soon. It’s just how the industry works, and let’s not forget that other publications were also allowed to break embargoes for some other titles.

 In case you are not familiar with embargoes, each and every game has an embargo when it comes to news, screenshots, videos, previews and reviews. Gaming websites are not allowed to break them, as they will be blacklisted from the publishers, thus they have to wait until the embargo gets lifted in order to publish their articles.  

Review embargoes are introduced in order to give a reviewer the appropriate time to play, finish and write his or her review about the X game. Therefore, it really puzzled a lot of people this exclusivity deal with IGN. In our opinion, on-going video reviews are the best way to review a game, however a lot of publications rely on the old-school article type of reviews. But that’s another topic.  Naturally, we’ll have a Performance Analysis for Bioshock: Infinite, however we don’t know when it will go live. Until then, though, enjoy the drama below!

Pichas not working.

IGN's reviews are the only ones I really look at so win for me. Reviews are mostly just spoilers in my book and nowadays I want none.

in order to get upset i would need some relevant info like what the deal is?

i mean it's not like there won't be any other reviews? there will just be one of them early?

i wonder if some reviewers will give bioshock a lower score now. i can really believe some will do it and if it's only something like a 89 instead of a 90 just because it looks much worse without being really unfair with the score then^^

Wait, they review products in an industry stuck in the rut of proprietary tech and exclusive content, yet they are bitching about exclusives. How about they turn that towards something that matters. They should be more worried about how many platforms are required to experience the content they review for. PC, PS3, PS Vita, WiiU, 3DS, X360, iOS, Android, and thats not all of them. This is hurting them more than any exclusive review. This is an issue that is causing the industry to sink in red ink, and is a major threat to the medium, and their jobs.

Reviewers should turn down exclusivity when it's in exchange for requiring a minimum score or talking about certain parts of the game. Content should be unaffected for the sake of integrity.

Apart from that there isn't a problem.

if IGN wants to moneyhat a review why not? heck I think vgchartz should start paying me for keeping me as an exclusive forum member on this site..

I don't see what the big deal is.