AIAS President: 'Game Reviewers Are Lazy'

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So the president of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences says that “game reviewers are lazy.” Do you agree? How many times have you played a game that reviewers raved about only to be sorely disappointed after you bought it?

"My pet peeve is that game reviewers are lazy," he said. "Not all, but in terms of the reviews [something like] 'This game isn't as good because let's compare it to that game over there and that game was great.' Who gives a, you know, bleep?" "How can you review a game, how can you give a comment about a game like Grand Theft Auto IV, that has 40-plus hours or more of gameplay, if you've only spent 2 1/2 to 3 hours playing it?"
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Back when we used to do them, our game reviews were done on retail games and played start to finish by 3 separate reviewers with three separate conclusions. All artwork and logos were done in house and no canned screenshots were used unless they were used for comparison to actual game play footage and so on. In-depth reviews like that are underappreciated in the industry and the rush to be “first” only complicates matters further. In other words, they want a quick and dirty “10” yet they compain about “laziness” in the industry. You can’t have both, can you?
 
I don't know if I'd call 2-3 hours of play as being "lazy" how many games get thrown their way? Are they only supposed to play the best ones? the most expensively pushed ones? I think reviewers should always start by saying how much of the game they played as there are quite a few games where the first part of the game is incredibly tedious/boring/lame, however that should be a good review comment as well.

Now if this is a review after release then ok maybe a tad lazy, however many games are reviewed the day of or before their release, they simply do not have the luxury to "beat them" and review it. Honestly that's what bloggers are for, big name reviewers they play games to give a general feel.
 
Thats right Steve! You reviewers are lazy! :D

jk! jk! Don't hurt me!
 
Yes... and to get the game, the reviewer had to walk through 2ft of snow, uphill... both ways.

The fact that review sites rush to publish to be "1st" is apparent in the quality of some articles (sometimes laughably so through typos and missing content). However, this tendancy is dictated by the readers. Yes, I'm guilty of scouring metacritic on release days for the first review -- but the ones I really spend time reading usually come out after the fact. I think the "quality" reviewers who take their time piecing together a review will always end up being the most read. Such is the case with [H] and PC hardware.
 
Doom 3 anyone?

I don't pay attention to review scores any more. Some of my favorite games have earned a 7 or 8. What I will do is read the review and form my own opinion from the features the author discusses.

Personally I'd prefer it if everyone stopped 'scoring' games and just talked about them.
 
Two things.
First, [H] Console was excellent, but good reviews sure do take time and money. I am sure it was very difficult to do good reviews when there were so many games to look at.

Second, if you are honest and do a good job; then say a game sucks......well you're fired....like the guy from GameSpot who said Kane and Lynch sucked and then was shown the door.
 
They don't want lazy reviewers, but I wonder how much they like some of the guys like Yahtzee Croshaw that are decidedly not lazy?

Okay it's a knowingly bad example but I love his stuff and everyone should watch it.

Seriously, though, didn't [H] even link to a "top 100" list of gaming review cliches fairly recently? It strikes me that most game reviews (I said most! not stuff like what you guys used to do here) are fairly worthless. A little bit of play time, recycled content, and a 1-10 score where anything under a 9.9 will be considered a grave insult if the budget was high enough? That sort of thing ain't worth much. Now, are the reviewers lazy, or is this sort of thing forced upon them by the MBAs in charge (see: Kane and Lynch)? I think this particular president may have his target a little wrong...
 
One of the big things that gets me is when the reviews don't mention major issues that they should have seen with the game. IE issues when the game is/is not played in widescreen or issues with lockups that they should have seen.

I will say this is the great thing about things like xbox live. You can get demos of a lot of games off it.
 
A few of my favorite games were given 5 out of 10. I believe the game Insane a bunch of years ago got terrible reviews but I still play that game today. I think the game Mobile Forces wasn't that well reviewed and I love that game another game that I still play all these years later...
 
Steve said:
How many times have you played a game that reviewers raved about only to be sorely disappointed after you bought it?
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Spending $60 for Halo 3's 10 minutes of story mission comes to mind as my most recent example of this.

On a related note, it was after Halo 3's disappointment that I came across Yahtzee's brilliant review of Halo 3. I've been a fan of his reviews ever since. The one on Jericho is also priceless, something along the lines of "beating Emo kids brutally with a baseball bat made of frozen 'stupid'".
 
Many of the sites(or other media forms) that do reviews receive most of their advertising from games that are being reviewed.

I am pretty sure advertising has been pulled when a bad review was given.
 
Well I subscribe to PC Gamer, more for the pictures than anything. However they have never led me astray yet. However I don't take anyone's review as the absolute truth for any game. If a game receives a positive review I will consider the game as a possibility.
 
I miss [H] Console!

I think many reviews are lazy, but most of the time you can tell that pretty quickly. Most of the big name reviewers at least give a fairly thorough review, even if not all their reviews are thoroughly fair.

I think most of the time if you actually read the whole review, you can get a good idea about whether or not you'll enjoy the game. They may not run into every single bug, but you can get a good idea of whether or not the gameplay is good, and isn't that what really matters?
 
I think we suffer inflation in the grading scale. 6 should be average, 7 should be good, 8 should be very good, 9 should be nearly perfect, and 10 should be Deus Ex.
 
How come [H] Console has gone away? No advertisers? No time for the games? No reviewers? Ever think of resurrecting it and making it even better than its former glory?
 
DarkTide said:
Doom 3 anyone?

I don't pay attention to review scores any more. Some of my favorite games have earned a 7 or 8. What I will do is read the review and form my own opinion from the features the author discusses.

Personally I'd prefer it if everyone stopped 'scoring' games and just talked about them.
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Having personal experience as a writer/journalist/reviewer (in the genres of music) I could not agree more.

The fact is, deadlines or not, that you're not doing your job as a reviewer if you:
1) Compare one release to another, because everything is different and (might) have something unique of it's own to offer.
2) You haven't spent time really delving into it, and giving it more than a "once-over" before making a final judgment.
3) Are not being objective, either in making comparisons to other titles/releases, and/or due to "pressures" of deadlines, advertising etc.

Everything must be judged on it's own merit, and not "compared" to anything else, unless it's for the sake of giving an idea of the type of content it has to offer.

I've run and written for a few different 'zines over many years, and when running my own, I had a massive number of readers from all over the world, and received mass amounts of emails from people stating that they loved the way I reviewed, not just due to my writing style and descriptiveness, but because I always followed the "rules" I listed above, which are my own personal beliefs from which I never waver.

I never reviewed for profit, and if I wrote a review that was "less than favorable", and something wanted to throw a fit and "burn bridges" by no longer sending me promo material, that was fine with me. I reviewed for the love of the art and expression, and am never effected by "pressure" from someone for a good or fast review.

As for "scoring", in terms of giving something a number rating, that's something I struggled with for years as a journalist. How do you assign something a number that truly reflects the quality or content of any given medium of expression? It's extremely frustrating, so it's more the explanation of the medium that means the most. Then the reader can decide whether or not, from what's been written, if the given creation offers something that appeals to them.

If you're going to assign number ratings, that's all the more reason to be completely objective and judge something on it's own merit in what it has to offer, otherwise, you end up assigning a rating that might not reflect the true qualities, good or bad, the creation has to offer.

Lastly, there are three major things that need to change:
1) People going too much with the "ADD" mentality, who only want to see a number, perhaps breeze through the written review, and make a snap judgment based on that. It's simply not reasonable, and the mentality of people needs to, essentially, "chill out" and be a bit "deeper", instead of like a child-like in terms of having no attention span and just "wanting everything right now.
2) Journalists need to stop catering to these mentalities and "caving" by continuing to review in such a rushed, and most times, "jaded" manner.
3) Everyone, both journalists and consumers alike, need to stop paying so much attention to the damn number ratings, and focus more on the actual description of any given creation.

I have over two decades of experience in the music industry, from both ends - releasing music, and the "business end" of things and having my releases reviewed by print mags and online 'zines alike, as well as reviewing and dealing with others and their releases - but I refuse to ever bend where my principals are concerned.

Lastly, for those who would say, "Well, these reviewers are pressured to get out the reviews at the risk of losing money", there is a very simple answer to this: if everyone took the stance of "Reviewing for quality, not money or time", the industry would have no choice but to accept it, because they'd otherwise never have a release reviewed on any website or in any magazine, and the mentality and methods would change.

It's a matter of publications coming together, so to speak, with the same mentality, in which case publishers would have no choice but to "just deal with it", and that's that.

'Nough said (and with a great deal of experience to back it up).
 
Jim Robbins said:
How come [H] Console has gone away? No advertisers? No time for the games? No reviewers? Ever think of resurrecting it and making it even better than its former glory?
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While [H] Console broke even / paid for itself, it suffered from the very same things that [H] Consumer did and so when they went, [H] Console went as well.

THIS ARTICLE explains it all.

As it is I work 12 - 14 hours a day doing the news, [H] Console was done on top of that...so you can imagine how that was. I loved doing it, it was a hard decision for everyone but a had to be done.
 
[H] Game reviews were the only ones I read, I miss them quite a bit.

I quit giving other game reviews an ounce of respect when they started handing out 10's to the game that paid them the most. Prime example? GTA IV, was not a 10 or anywhere even close. That said, I have found services like Gamefly pretty much invaluable to someone like me who has multiple consoles. I rent it and if I like it then I buy it if it is unbeatable in a reasonable period of time or i plan on replaying it.
 
i dont want a score


i dont expect every site to review every game


i want to here about the experience.
 
magoo said:
Second, if you are honest and do a good job; then say a game sucks......well you're fired....like the guy from GameSpot who said Kane and Lynch sucked and then was shown the door.
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Or worse (for the magazine/website) you give a bad review that company doesn't give you review copies any more. Pretty harsh when many larger companies (EA) buy up all the smaller ones to publish the games under their larger banner. So I don't blame the reviewers as much as I do their bosses.
 
Steve said:
While [H] Console broke even / paid for itself, it suffered from the very same things that [H] Consumer did and so when they went, [H] Console went as well.

THIS ARTICLE explains it all.

As it is I work 12 - 14 hours a day doing the news, [H] Console was done on top of that...so you can imagine how that was. I loved doing it, it was a hard decision for everyone but a had to be done.
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Would you guys consider opening [H] Console's doors back open if you had more people on board to do reviews? I'm sure some folks around here wouldn't mind.
 
When I still used to read EDGE magazine, there was one episode where, just for an experiment, they omitted the review scores from the end of all their articles. Originally, I didn't really think it would have made a difference, but I caught myself reading reviews for games I wouldn't normally care either way about just to satisfy my curiosity. I was a bit peeved when I realised they had copped out and printed the review scores in small print at the back, but it was the thought that counted.
 
some games only "have" 2-3 hours worth of gameplay anyway...if its repetitive, just say so.
 
Will have to agree with this poster.

The points made about reviewers being fired over honest reviews as well. I have heard, but am not in the position to have actually witnessed, that production companies pay review sites and magazines to give their new product good scores. Now they dont pay them outright, they pay them in advertising dollars. If you give a game a bad review, the company pulls its advertising.

And lets face it, some places live off the advertising money.

I dont think they are lazy, they just have more games then they do time to extensively review every game. And how many of us would want to extensively test or review some game that royally sucked for us, but some gamer out there cant wait to get their hands on?
 
I really don't trust any site but Gamespot. But I don't even like them as much as I did when Jeff was there.

Anyway, really you just gotta try to figure out how a game is based on reviews and what your friends say... that's about it.
 
I subscribe to PC Gamer and I read the major game review sites. Ben Croshaw's reviews are definitely Not Safe for Work, but have a real charm to their passion.

I think that game publications are unique in their dependence upon the very industry that they review and the time necessary to play through a game. In general, those of us who game need to get our reviews from print media like PC Gamer or the Internet. This is unlike film reviews, which one can read in the local paper or in popular news magazines. Films take only 2-3 hours to watch allt he wy through, while games take 20-40+ hours to play in their entirety. A single person doing film reviews can see several films over the course of two days. A single person doing game reviews can play perhaps 1 game in its entirety over the course of two days, though perhaps this isn't possible if the game is Oblivion or World of Warcraft! Additionally, print media like The New York Times receives advertising from several different sources, but gaming publications receive advertising from, you guessed it, game publishers.

I think the suggestion to get rid of scoring is a useful one. What I'd prefer is something that would promote the kind of reviews that avoid the sins mentioned by Infaustium. For example, I'd like to see something of the following:
  • A sense of where a game fits in a genre. For example, if this is an FPS game, where is its niche? Does it cross any boundaries or do anything different from our stereotypical FPS?
  • An overview gameplay design features. Are levels linear or open-ended? Is this a skill-based or item-based game? If there's a multi-player component, what design elements facilitate in-game grouping?
  • An inventory of UI features. How easy and intuitive is inventory control? If player characters level up, is the player given enough information about skills or skill trees to be able to make intelligent choices regarding character development?
  • Sequel and port comments. Tell me how the sequel builds upon and evolves from the original game. If I liked the original, will I find the sequel more polished? And if the game is a port, will it make this pc gamer curse the fact that so many ports forget that pcs have a mouse, wasd, a space bar, lots of other keys, and function keys? In other words, don't make me "tab" through options just because consoles don't typically have cursors. I have a mouse. I can point and click. There.
  • Careful comments designed to offer helpful hints on who might like the game. Here, careful comparison to some big name games can help. For example, if you like PvP but hate the level grind and item grind that WoW requires, will you like the mechanic in a game like AoC?
I wish I had more time to play games, but I hold down a full-time job and have a husband I'd like to stay married to! :p I depend on game reviews to give me ideas on what might be good ways to spend my limited gaming time.

/dream on

--ceolstan
 
SamuraiInBlack said:
Would you guys consider opening [H] Console's doors back open if you had more people on board to do reviews? I'm sure some folks around here wouldn't mind.
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Hell, I'd do reviews if you let me, not sure if my rhetoric is on par with big reviewers, though.

I mean all I do after a long day at work is sit in my room, alone, and play games. /emo :(

har har har.
 
The pc magazine(s?) reviews will tell you when they CAN'T complete a game, or in the case of an open game, say how long they played for, and their overall impressions.

Those like GTA are hard to fully go through even IF you went straight through mission-mission when that is only about half of the game, and most gamers/developers understand that if they want their game to GET a review within it's first couple of weeks on the shelf.

WEB reviews on the other hand unless they used to be a mag or are run by magazine people do have a problem with FIRST syndrome especially on AAA games
 
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