Hello everyone your resident certifiably insane angry gamer returns to share with you a rather serious issue that’s been creeping up in the gaming industry lately, the new practice of publishers that is slowly but surely killing gaming news sites such as IGN, GameTrailers, GameSpot,…..
The main reason gamers go to sites such as these is to get the exclusive, hot new information or trailer or gameplay footage of their highly anticipated title that they cant find anywhere else and the success of these articles and videos allows these sites to earn money and stay afloat, and for a long time no one interfered with this so everything was right with the world, until some dumbass got the bright idea to mess it all up.
You see publishers in recent years have come up with this new strategy that fully benefits them and completely screws over everyone else, now publishers are more than ever promoting their own sites and/or YouTube channels and the more views their videos received the more cash goes into little slimy douche bags wallet.
Publishers now don’t give these gaming sites these videos or interviews and release it on their own sites and YouTube channels and cut off a significant number of people and sites from their primary source of income.
Sooner or later independent gaming news sites will be extinct resulting in publishers having complete and utter control over information that is released to the general public allowing them to put any number of PR spins on the information and we wont be able to discern what’s true or not.
It will create a gaming industry where publishers will have huge information control on the scale of Stalin era Soviet Union or the Third Reich, leaving us the consumers totally at the mercy of money grubbing corporate bastards and causing thousands of people involved in gaming journalism to lose their livelihood.
We as gamers need to make a stand and support sites like IGN, GameSpot and GameTrailers because that way we can help sites of that nature to survive and keep us from falling pray to the latest publisher money whoring, consumer robbing practices that are becoming alarmingly common in the industry.
However I wish the issue was that simple because recently it has become painfully apparent that many journalists are actually selling out to publishers just for a little extra money completely betraying everything they should stand for, and this year we have several confirmed sell out journalists such as Geoff Keighley.
So what did Geoff do to prove that he’s a sell out? Well back in November before the release of Halo 4 participated in a promotional video where people could call him and ask him various questions ranging from E3, to the VGAs to gaming journalism and so forth, sounds like something good coming from one of the most recognized and respected memebers of the industry right?
Well you’d be wrong because during the video not only was he surrounded by a bunch of Mtn Dew and Doritos merchandise and at the beginning promoted a Mtn Dew XP program where if you buy some more Mtn Dew you get free experience points in Halo 4 before you even play the game!
So while he’s doing his mind numbingly obvious product placement, he preaches on and on about the need for more honest, hard working game journalists and telling more people to get into such a line of work while at the same time clearly proving that he betrayed his journalistic integrity by participating in a video that’s sole purpose was to sell more Mtn Dew and Doritos more than anything else.
It shocked and surprised me because this is the man who defended GTA 4 and Mass Effect from people like Fox News who clearly don’t know two shits about gaming and didn’t even play either of the formerly mentioned games, he is the most well known and possibly respected person in the industry and when has the balls to sellout in such a way on public TV shows just how far the mighty have fallen.
Not enough for you? Okay, how about the firing of Jeff Gerstmann from GameSpot back in 2007 due to him giving Kane & Lynch: Dead Men 6 out of 10 when just prior to release Eidos Interactive paid GameStop a considerable amount of money so that they could have all sorts of commercials and promos play on the site.
Jeff was fired from his position at GameStop and in 2012 it was revealed that the reason for this was that Eidos threatened to pull all advertising revenue due to the low score if Jeff wasn’t fired, well it worked out because now we got GiantBomb from that debacle
Still not convinced, okay I’ve got one more for you. During this years GMAs (Games Media Awards) a yearly function in the UK where the best editors and games journalists are awarded for their work, however they are voted on by PR and sponsored by publishers.
This year it got particularly out of control when many journalists who promoted games for these said publishers trough Twitter were almost guaranteed to win an award they do not deserve since they effectively destroyed any sort of integrity they may have.
Columnist Rob Florence of Eurogamer called out this corruption in gaming journalism and gave several very good points as to how bad the situation was and backed it up with proof such as the formerly mentioned tweets, one of the exposed journalists threatened Eurogamer with a libel suit and Florence effectively left Eurogamer but not before writing an even longer and more in-depth piece on the shortcomings of gaming journalism.
I will give the links to both of these down below because they perfectly show just how corrupt and bad the situation is.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-10-24-lost-humanity-18-a-table-of-doritos
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/10/26/all-the-pretty-doritos-how-video-game-journalism-went-off-the-rails/
So there you have it my friends, the situation is growing dire but if there’s one thing that gives me solace and should give you some as well is the unity of gamers in situations like these, while we may be a divided bunch over what console is better or what game is better most of the time but when publishers go on the bullshit offensive and try to cheat, rob and deceive us we will unite and we will fight them every step of the way and we will emerge victorious in the end.
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