I have run across several pieces on the internets lately about the legitimacy and ethics of video game reviews online. As a person who works for the money I spend on games, it’s important to me that the reviews I read are honest. Unfortunately, I believe that game reviews are generally more inflated and tampered with than most other media reviews.

The good thing about movie reviews is that you can usually pick out the obvious shills. When the commercial runs a quote and you can’t read the source on a 50″ HDTV, you can probably guess it’s a shill. Likewise, Maxim magazine’s reviewers and Harry Knowles at AICN are obviously much less reliable than a iconic reviewer like Roger Ebert.

At this point, however, the only game review sites that seem somewhat reliable are Penny Arcade and Gamespot. Yesterday Gabe and Penny Arcade made a rather mysterious post about Assassin’s Creed, the reviews it was getting, and how they handle advertising on their site with games. It’s an interesting read, and you should check it out.

What makes Gabe’s post much more interesting is what I found over on Surfer Girl’s blog. She has insider information about Ubisoft cutting off ad revenue to sites giving Assassin’s Creed reviews lower than an 8/10.

Reading the two posts together seems to put some pieces of the puzzle together. If you enjoy reading between the lines to find the “real” news of the day, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what’s going on here. Ubisoft, a company who puts out one high profile game after another seems to be using their ad revenue leverage to inflate their review scores.

As a person who once served as music director at a college radio station, I have seen the kinds of promotional materials you can receive for charting certain albums and I know how much money major corporations will spend to market in this fashion.

You can make your own conclusions in this case, and maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree here. All I know is that after suffering through several high profile Ubisoft games that I hated (Splinter Cell(s), GRAW(s), Rainbow Six (not vegas), etc) reading these posts pop up on the internet does not make me feel better about the company and makes me put them down towards the evil category with EA. After this year’s continuous praise of the pile of trash that is Madden 08, I cannot be alone is seeing these trends. Big corporate game studios seem to be tampering with journalists and the list of reliable sources seems to be contracting.

What is the answer? I am not sure. Feel free to join me in the forum to continue the discussion.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 7:59 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.