Why Videogame Journalism Sucks

[The Former DMiller]

Totally agree with you lazy. Blogs are good because people don't have to worry about keeping game companies happy. The videogame industry is different from the movie industry because if you give a bad review to a movie it doesn't matter because you don't rely on the studios to watch movies. Unless you are an independent movie critic your publication pays your way into movies so you can write you reviews, and you can still get into sneak previews even after writing a bad review. The videogame industry is totally different. At N-Philes we used to get a lot of review games from companies which is why my games collection includes such games as Shrek 2 and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. We were never told that we had to give good reviews to games, but it was understood that we shouldn't totally trash a game because we relied on these companies to get our games, and they aren't going to keep sending games to a fan site that doesn't have the cache of an IGN or a Gamespot if we are trashing their games. It was hard to not fully express my opinion on some games, and it was one of the reasons I stopped writing reviews. Nintendojo kept trying to get me to work for them, but I just didn't want to do it anymore.

As for previews, I think they are even worse than reviews. For most of my time at N-Philes we never wrote previews because our director thought they served no purpose that a press release doesn't fill, and I totally agreed with him. Previews may tell you something about a game that you didn't know, but they are shameless marketing tools masquerading as news about an upcoming game. I love the idea brought up in the article above that previews should be a critique of what is wrong with an early version of a game so the developer has some feedback to work on possible problems. We couldn't do that at N-Philes since we didn't have a developer's GameCube (although we almost ended up getting one), but that is something I think is a much better use of previews.

It's too bad that money and keeping people happy is what drives videogame journalism now, and it is definitely one of the things that is holding back the industry from becoming as accepted as movies as an art form. I used to want to be a videogame journalist full-time, and I saw myself as the Roger Ebert of videogame reviews, but my work in the industry really disillusioned me on the whole thing, and I didn't see myself able to work in an industry I didn't respect.