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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Why is it legal to set rules for people to review your product?

DKII on 02 June 2008

Why is it legal? Are you serious? Why wouldn't it be legal? Being legal has nothing to do with being ethical. Media have no right to be able to access an early review copy, so the publisher is free to impose whatever restrictions they please just as the media is free to accept those restrictions or decline them and not get/use the review copy.

I've never heard of publishers actually trying to censor the review content before (usually it's "You can only post your review early if it's above a 9.0" or something similar) but it's not really surprising. What's rather disturbing is all the lemming media who went along with it.

And IGN UK is a far cry from the main site, who at least hasn't gone through with this stunt.



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rocketpig on 02 June 2008
Words Of Wisdom said:
rocketpig said:

I don't think that's the case. EGM said similar things when Ubisoft tried to pull restrictions on them and Ubi ended up pulling all advertising from the magazine for quite some time.

When it hits the bottom line (like one of the top five publishers in the world pulling adverts), you know that it stops being a ploy and turns into a real statement by the publication.

Attention is nice but it has a habit of going away very quickly. Losing tens of thousands of dollars a month doesn't compensate for a little forum talk over how "respectible" you are.


Do you have a link for the Ubisoft incident? I'm not aware of that (or I simply don't recall it).

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/01/09/publishers-allegedly-blackball-egm-for-negative-coverage/

There's a link about review copies. I can't seem to find anything about the pulled adverts right now.




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FreeTalkLive on 02 June 2008
Hapimeses said:
In short: the intellectual property (IP) used in the review is privately owned. If you want review code early -- i.e.: you want access to their privately owned IP before the rest of the market -- you may be requested to sign the equivalent of an non-disclosure agreement, limiting your ability to freely talk about their IP. However, once that IP is released freely on the market, such limitations come to an end for obvious reasons.

So, if you want a review potentially filled with spoliers, or discussing aspects of the game that the publisher does not wished to be discussed, wait until after the game has had its official release.

That's about it. Nothing especially sinister, although it does pass control to the IP owners rather than the reviewers. And given most reviewers want their reviews out early, they sometimes have to sacrfice their free speech in the short term to achieve this.

 Someone with a brain, thank you.  I am shocked that some many gamers are calling for more laws from the government to restrict freedoms when it comes to games.  All these gamers will end up doing is damaging and restricting games while also making it more expensive.  In fact, they are calling for the exact opposite of what will improve their hobby.  Considering all of the horrible things excessive government laws have already done to gaming, I'd think most serious gamers would get it by now.



 

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TheBigFatJ on 02 June 2008
mike_intellivision said:

But this can backfire in the video game world. Nintendo evidently did not give "Game Informer" permission to talk about some Wii features/games prior to its release. The magazine has not been kind to the console since.


It depends what the deal with the list is. If it's "we don't want to give our competitors any ideas of our strategy" then, yes, it makes perfect sense. If it's "we don't want people to know things about our product because they're negative," then that's obviously bad.

But if a reviewer punishes a company for attaching strings, that's just petty and unprofessional, and I would never read a magazine like that.

Someone with a brain, thank you.  I am shocked that some many gamers are calling for more laws from the government to restrict freedoms when it comes to games.  All these gamers will end up doing is damaging and restricting games while also making it more expensive.

Well, consider a case where top reviewers all formed a union where they'd have to accept the set of restrictions together or none of them could review the game.  That would keep the restrictions reasonable, and the reviewers would have no incentive to give a better review for earlier access.

An example of an unreasonable restriction would be, say, not allowing you to talk about the length and types of cut scenes, as this could in no way spoil the game, but may be perceived as undesirable to many gamers.