A Price Of Games Journalism

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Are publishers still blacklisting game journalists over reviews? Seriously, that never works and only makes the company look bad. Can't we all just get along. ;)

For the past two years, Kotaku has been blacklisted by Bethesda, the publisher of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series. For the past year, we have also been, to a lesser degree, ostracized by Ubisoft, publisher of Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and more.
 
who in their right minds reads k*taku?

game publishers tend to know their audience anyways.
 
I would agree more if games journalists didn't do terrible job all the time. Not only that, they aren't blacklisted, they just don't get free or advanced copies. That isn't a proper definition of blacklisting. Bunch of sour grapes here.
 
IMHO "Games Journalists" are as useful as SCSI floppy drives at this moment.
 
We are long past the expert game reviewers we had in the 80's (I am not sure if anyone here is old enough to remember PC Gaming World before their buyout and expert reviewers like Scorpia, but we definitely don't have that level in our reviewers anymore) .... the modern blog based approach to reviews gives the companies the ability to pick and choose who they want writing reviews based on the audience of their sites, professionalism of the reviews, conformance to NDAs, expertise in the genre, etc ... I don't think it is anything more nefarious than companies ignoring the bloggers/sites who just crap all over them (regardless of the game) or who have audiences that aren't going to be responsive to the reviews
 
"Games Journalism" ... is that like Amazon Product Journalism and App Store Journalism?
 
I honestly can't say I have ever seen a SCSI Floppy Drive. A little searching shows they do exist, who knew? :D
 
Funny that you guys are so myopic that don't see the parallel between this and what AMD did to HardOCP.
 
Guys, Kotaku is dedicated to bringing you the 'truth in gaming'.

Seriously, they put that phrase in their bitch post.
 
"The truth is that we’ve been cut off from Bethesda since our December 2013 report detailing the existence of the then-secret Fallout 4. "


If you're gonna play you're gonna pay!
 
Pringle said:
Guys, Kotaku is dedicated to bringing you the 'truth in gaming'.

Seriously, they put that phrase in their bitch post.
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Am I the only one who just had this flash of the princess bride where Vizzini with a Kotaku caption above his head says "I bring you TRUTH in gaming" ... Inigo Montoya with the PC Gamer Master race icon then responds, "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means" :D
 
We serve our readers, not game companies, and will always do so to the best of our ability, no matter who in the gaming world is or isn’t angry with us at the moment. In some ways, the blacklist has even been instructive—cut off from press access and pre-release review copies, we have doubled down on our post-release “embedding” approach to games coverage. We’ve experienced some of the year’s biggest games from street level, at the same time and in the same way as our readers.
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Excellent you can not say that about a lot of websites which give questionable reviews of mediocre games in change of advertisements for their magazine or website or just to stay on the company good side.
 
I am sure that many would disagree but the problem with game reviews is we get them too fast ... in the preinternet days in the early/mid 80's you sometimes had to wait a month or two months to get reviews (long after the launch) ... but the reviews were better and much more thorough ... now unfortunately we have preorder fever (so we get previews for a year or more) and we have launch fever (with a flood of reviews the first week of game availability) ... I know we can't return to those days but there were some advantages of having to wait and reading detailed professional reviews of the AAA games.
 
Oh now Kotaku are journalists? That's funny when they get called out for shilling their roommates games (hernandez), or hyping a game THE AUTHOR WAS A BETA TESTER FOR (grayson who later dated said developer) they are "bloggers".
 
Revdarian said:
Funny that you guys are so myopic that don't see the parallel between this and what AMD did to HardOCP.
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Kotaku claims they're bloggers when they get called out on things they do that would be unbecoming of journalists.

Then they claim they're journalists when they get passed off as bloggers.

Kotaku (and all of Gawker) is a clickbaiting wailing look at us bullshit joke of a site (company).

[H]ard is legit. They might be blunt, pull no punches, and maybe considered rude by some - but legit nonetheless.

That's the difference.
 
Oh, and the sooner you guys release games "journalists" don't exist, the sooner we can stop pretending it's a thing.
 
Dreaz said:
Oh, and the sooner you guys release games "journalists" don't exist, the sooner we can stop pretending it's a thing.
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Pretty much. How may real journalists actually work doing game reviews worldwide? 4? 5 maybe? I don't know that number for certain. I do know that none of them work for K_taku.
 
Yep. People have to realize that if you do something that you know full well is going to piss a company off then you're probably going to fall from their good graces. Developers have no shortage of people willing to review the game so cutting one group off and giving an early version to another website doesn't really bother the company at all.

All I see in that article is Gawker Media whining because they LOVE tweaking the noses of every company they can to prove that they're "real journalists". But, when the ramifications for doing that show up they scream how unfair things are. I do read some articles from over there, mostly on Jalopnik, but many parts of the Gawker Media group are run like a University newspaper with the same immaturity and spoiled brat mentality you see in those students. They expect to be able to say and do anything and still get all the access in the world. As others have said, they regularly jump back and forth between calling themselves "bloggers" and "journalists" depending on the situation. It shows that they're really trying to have their cake and eat it too and that carries over into pissing people off and still expecting access.

Look, I'm not saying that they shouldn't tweak the noses of certain companies. Many probably deserve it and need it from time to time. But, doing so makes them a ton of money in page visits so whining about access after that is very disingenuous.
 
Wow, just wow. Someone send them some expensive cheese to go with that whine!
 
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