The review dilemma, or when publishers get pissy

10:15 AM on 04.16.2008   |   Colette Bennett

40 comments

As anyone reading any gaming blog can tell you, reviews are a big deal. No matter how objective a reviewer attempts to be, every review draws some disagreement, positive or negative score aside. However, unlike discussion of a film or a book face-to-face where people actually try to speak with some level of restraint or concern of offending others, reactions on the Internet can span from telling the reviewer he or she is a waste of human flesh in the comments to mailing a flaming bag of crap to their doorstep. Tact and dignity are not oft practiced here, which is what people both love and hate about the Internet.

The whole issue was stirred back up in my thoughts today by an article from DS Fanboy in which an ex-Gamespot reviewer got an alleged email from Majesco about a review he did for Cooking Mama 2. While I'd like to trace back to the source and say it's possible that the email could have been faked, the possibility of it being real is strong. It isn't necessarily shocking though -- the Jeff Gerstmann incident, while often debated as to its relativity to Gerstmann's loss of a job, still stirred heavy debate and all types of retaliations.

Want to see this letter and hear more of what I think about all this reviews business? Hit the jump.

Well. The sender of this email is not a happy little puppy. Now, just to make sure all the facts are in place before I continue, the original review is here, in which the author says "Dinner With Friends tastes like reheated leftovers." Well, that would smart a bit had I made that game, and while my own review of it was a bit more positive, I did mention that it felt like more of the same as well -- just not quite as harshly. However, Destructoid has published quite a few negative reviews in its day, and suffered all the hellfire that spawns in their wake. You may not agree with our review, but we tell the truth about how we feel about the experience of playing the game, which people don't always like to hear.

This email is an example of what can happen when a writer decides not to use the "7-10 scale," as it is often called. Some smaller sites that publish negative reviews may even run the risk of angering a publisher to the point of jeopardizing the relationship with them, and I'm sure some sites don't see copies of certain review titles because of it. Unprofessional? Sure -- but that's not the point here.

As a game journalist, blogger or whatever you like to call yourself, your integrity is on the line every time you sit down to review a game, something the angry bees of the Internet may not think about before they unleash their fury in your comment section. Saying a game is sub-par is a difficult thing to do in more ways than one.  Some writers may find it more important to retain the relationships they have with publishers, while others feel the relationship to the reader is the more important one. Either way, you can be sure that both things are happening on a regular basis in this industry.

My personal take? Stick to your guns, whether it's on a forum for your own personal use or you write posts for a gaming website. No review is perfect or 100 percent objective; just like reviews of anything else in the world, it's a written essay containing someone's opinion on something. The Cooking Mama 2 review seems like an honest opinion, and the writer was clearly blasted for it, but the negative review is still posted (and honestly, on a 1-10 scale, a 6 isn't all that bad). Your readers will thank you for it, and even if your honest opinion isn't perfect, it beats the hell out of of a flawless, but dishonest one.