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Originally Posted by zabuni
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Right off the bat, it needs to be remembered that most serious games are projects that have involved dozens, if not hundreds of people for years (not talking about the licensed crap). The developer, in most cases, kills itself to get a game completed.
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Don't care. Really don't care. If you spent hundreds of man-years on a piece of crap, the end result is still a piece of crap.
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The fact is game journalists – of which there are hundreds at the moment – are living off the blood sweat and tears of creative people who love games and regularly work 100 hours weeks. The fact they casually rip on a game gives others involved in the development and marketing process good reason to pissed.
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Still don't care. And why can't they casually rip into a game. Is he really asking for fawning praise? |
Greetings:
So, in case you don't already know, I work at a publisher and am therefore appropriately biased. I also came out of development and work closely with developers, so I'm biased there, too.
Here's why I think it matters: it's easy to criticize, but hard to create. Even the best, most thoughtful, most thorough reviewer spends a tiny fraction of the time evaluating the game and writing his/her review as any one of the developers spends making the game. That's a fact, and it's not going to change, nor should we expect it to.
Where it becomes a problem is when reviewers spend so little time and effort in the evaluation or the writing that they miss important aspects of the game, mislead the public with bad information, and/or fail to see past their own expectations or experience to understand the appeal a game has to other players.
Reviewers speak as authorities. When they pass judgment on a game, implicit in that is that they know enough to do so, that their perspective is sufficiently representative to be of value to a wide audience, and that they have put in the time and work to do a full evaluation of the game. I'm not saying that reviewers can be objective, but they can be sophisticated and skilled and dedicated to their craft.
When someone
casually rips into a game without the expertise or due diligence to really understand what they're ripping apart, they're disrespecting all of those people who invested years of their lives into making the game. They're doing a disservice to their readers. They're lowering the standards for games journalism. That's a problem.
Yes, a piece of crap is a piece of crap. Hell, those are the easy ones. The difficulty lies in the middle ground, of games that are good but not great, or mediocre but not bad. If someone bashes a game like it is a piece of crap because that's the easy path, when there's something of actual value there, have they really done their job? Don't the people who made that game have a right to be mad about it?
Truly great games are rare. There's a handful of them every year. Most of the industry works on games that will never reach that level. Having someone call your game crap because it's not Halo or Bioshock or Grand Theft Auto, well, it sucks. Having someone call your game crap because it's for kids or based on a license, well, that sucks too. Having someone call your game crap when they haven't played it enough to understand it, or are so biased that they can't see what it is for what they would rather be playing, that sucks.
I can call a review crap, and I'm disparaging maybe a couple weeks worth of work (MMO reviews aside), and nobody reads it because I'm not published under the banner of an established media organ. And everyone will think it's just sour grapes. Or, they'll think I'm just shilling for my company. That's a mighty difference; it's an unfair playing field. I, for one, am glad that there's a PR rep out there who actually gets it.
You may not care, as a consumer, but as someone whose work is criticized publicly, often by amateurs, occasionally on false premises, it does matter to me. Or, YMMV.
Best,
Michael.