Hassan Sheikh | XBO Staff's blog
The state of video game reviews today.
Let's face it; there’s a glaring issue facing all websites/organizations that are currently offering reviews on their websites:
Reviews are being bought, not earned. Let's face it, say you’re a small time video-game reviewing magazine. Company A offers you a free upcoming video, as well as an exclusive interview with the developers. Excited of course, you ask for the catch, only to find out that the company will only give you these things if you agree before hand to a score of at least an eight.
Think I'm lying? Take a look at some of the games that have been getting extremely hyped, only to crash and burn. For example, does anyone remember Haze? The shooter that was going to revolutionize the industry? How many of you just had to Google the name to remember what I'm exactly talking about? The game, after receiving not stop praise for two years as being extremely innovative and just what the genre needed ended up being a gimmicky, generic shooter that most people regretted ever buying.
We here at xboxnowonline have had our fair share of videogames that span the gauntlet between excellent (Grand Theft Auto IV, for example) to terrible (Double D Dodge ball), and have felt that our assessment of them represent accurate, unbiased opinions.
It's a sticky situation now-a-days; you can either be honest or be cut off from exclusive content, or you can start slanting the truth and begin to hurt your credibility.
This is why we’ve decided to change the format of our reviews, as per the long post made by Hamza the other day. We want you to know what the game is like. The scores don't mean much in the end; it's really the description of the game that'll sell it. For example, I love fighting games, so I'm fairly confident my upcoming review on Soul Caliber IV will be fairly high. Now, if you hate fighting games, I doubt anything I could EVER say would change your mind. That was the thought behind the "To buy-rent- or forget" idea that we put up on our latest reviews, the thought being if you like the genre, and like what we had to say about the review than maybe you'll want to go out and buy it.
Know this though; no matter the amount of reviews we put out, or the amount of exclusive content we have access too, we will always make sure you get the truth. Cause, let's be frank, for us small-timers, that's all we got, don't we?
Reviews are being bought, not earned. Let's face it, say you’re a small time video-game reviewing magazine. Company A offers you a free upcoming video, as well as an exclusive interview with the developers. Excited of course, you ask for the catch, only to find out that the company will only give you these things if you agree before hand to a score of at least an eight.
Think I'm lying? Take a look at some of the games that have been getting extremely hyped, only to crash and burn. For example, does anyone remember Haze? The shooter that was going to revolutionize the industry? How many of you just had to Google the name to remember what I'm exactly talking about? The game, after receiving not stop praise for two years as being extremely innovative and just what the genre needed ended up being a gimmicky, generic shooter that most people regretted ever buying.
We here at xboxnowonline have had our fair share of videogames that span the gauntlet between excellent (Grand Theft Auto IV, for example) to terrible (Double D Dodge ball), and have felt that our assessment of them represent accurate, unbiased opinions.
It's a sticky situation now-a-days; you can either be honest or be cut off from exclusive content, or you can start slanting the truth and begin to hurt your credibility.
This is why we’ve decided to change the format of our reviews, as per the long post made by Hamza the other day. We want you to know what the game is like. The scores don't mean much in the end; it's really the description of the game that'll sell it. For example, I love fighting games, so I'm fairly confident my upcoming review on Soul Caliber IV will be fairly high. Now, if you hate fighting games, I doubt anything I could EVER say would change your mind. That was the thought behind the "To buy-rent- or forget" idea that we put up on our latest reviews, the thought being if you like the genre, and like what we had to say about the review than maybe you'll want to go out and buy it.
Know this though; no matter the amount of reviews we put out, or the amount of exclusive content we have access too, we will always make sure you get the truth. Cause, let's be frank, for us small-timers, that's all we got, don't we?
