marc said:
Uhm a free fan based website is usually not as corrupt as your highly valued expensive industry publisher. Have you ever read those expensive magazines and their game reviews? They are all paid off by companies. So to answer your question, I would be more inclined to believe the source making little to no profit especially in todays world. |
A free fan-based website can also be much more biased than one with more of an image to keep intact.
Sure NPD is probably biased as well(and being paid off for some titles they review), but think about their industry; if all of the games they review were perfect because the company was paid off, soon enough the magazine won't be considered any good and even getting paid off will not keep them in business.
A similar case could be said about VG, but they don't have as much on the line.
NPD has to keep their image good otherwise they will not see enough money and fail. They have to stay professional by being honest as much as possible.
Who is competing with NPD? No one is. Thus they can get away with pretty much anything and everyone will still use them since we really cant tell if they are telling the truth or not. If there were viable competition then thats a different story but this is not the case here. It the same issue we have MS and windows. They illegaly (and were found guilty of this) killed competition early on and in doing so pretty much got away with anything later. Bad security? Who cares, its not like they have any alternatives so lets take our time and not fix them till someone actually reports it. Someone lost their life savings because of a well documentd trojan? Not our problem it took 3 years to patch the exploit. This is what monopolies can do and NPD falls pretty much under that category at this time.
