HEXUS.afterburner - Are they really that innocent?
HEXUS.afterburner
HEXUS.gaming Editor, Nick Haywood, writes:
I’ve been following this one with interest as the implications go way beyond just Gamespot and affect every review title, be it print or web, software or hardware. In fact, this sorry mess casts doubt over a whole lot areas - not just games but also for any review of technology or, perhaps, every review of anything at all.
Just think about it - if advertising is the revenue source for a title (and here 'title- can mean printed publications or web sites), then there’s always the chance that a title will skew its reviews to favour better advertising deals.
Now I know you lot aren't naïve enough to believe for one second that this doesn't go on but it does leave you wondering who you can trust. And here would be the point where I might evangelise about HEXUS’ editorial integrity. But I won't, simply because you should make up your own minds about every title you read.
Actually, I can’t resist a bit of evangelism, so skip this bit if you want… HEXUS keeps its advertising and editorial strictly separate, leaving us writers to just get on and tell it how it is. For sure, you may well not agree with some of the reviews but that’ll happen, no matter what you’re reading.
The point is, all of the guys writing the news and reviews have bugger all to do with advertising and, in the very rare cases where we might be asked about adverts, we pass the enquiry on to the right person and have nothing more to do with it. Sure, I’ll sniff out a lead and pass it on but, honestly, I have no idea how much an ad on HEXUS goes for and, until the ad goes up, I don’t even know who's advertising with us.
But, and this is a biggie, if our editorial shone a poor light on an advertisers product we’d 150% stand by the editorial. And yes, I have been asked by games publishers why I gave a game a low score but I’ve never been asked to change the score or felt that I’ve been under any pressure, either from a game publisher or from within HEXUS itself, to be kinder to a title. And it's the same for everyone who works at HEXUS, we have complete free rein to say it how we see it, which is, I guess, why so many of you like reading our editorial.
And this is why I was so surprised about this whole Eidos/Gamespot thing.
I find it very hard, even with the alleged US$2 million deal, to believe that Eidos demanded the sacking. I have very good relationships with all the games publishers, often with multiple people within each publisher and yes, they’ll hype a game pre-launch, but they know when a game is good or bad and they all take the rough with the smooth, the slatings with the applause. I’ve yet to experience anyone getting even slightly arsey over us giving a game a low score.
Now, back to this Gamespot thing as there’s one, possibly minor, issue I have with all this and it’s that these other guys are leaving now?
And I say 'now', as in at this moment in time, rather than back when Gerstmann was sacked.
The crux of the whole thing is that he was sacked after giving Kane and Lynch a low score which then kicked off this whole alleged advertisers-putting-pressure-on-editorial thing.
But, and here’s the kicker, if these journos were so concerned about their integrity, why didn’t they hand in their cards back then? Why wait so long?
Okay, it's possible that they felt they had to line up something else, to keep the money coming in, which is fair enough and perfectly understandable. But the blog kinda makes them out to be saintly martyrs, walking away because it’s all gone too far - but, in my view, they’re not.
I say this because, if the blog is true, the whole favourable-placement-of-editorial thing linking to GameTrax has been going on a lot longer - and well before Gerstmann’s sacking - since reviews are just as slanted if Gamespot is selling favourable positions.
And, looking at how that affects orders placed by retailers, it’s actually near-on fraudulent. Yet these guys were happy to carry on working while this was going on.
The cynic in me - which is raging quite strongly in my sea of near-schizophrenic personalities right now- says that these guys have left now after they’d seen that the tide of opinion wasn’t going to sway back in Gamespot’s favour anytime soon and that the sacking was bringing unwanted scrutiny on how the site works. In short, they’re jumping ship when it’s obvious that the fire is out of control.
But hey, that’s just me being a cynic and not at all based on anything extrapolated from the whole debacle such as likely falling ad revenues as publishers get wary of big campaigns on a perceived-to-be-bent-site etc.
I think the most important lesson for all of us, not just gaming, is that if your integrity and honesty are called into question and you don’t deal with it publicly and transparently, you’re totally fucked. You’ll haemorrhage readers and advertisers in less time than it takes to say “no, really, we’re ok”. And rightly so.
You can rest assured, this kind of situation is an impossibility on HEXUS, the site just doesn’t work that way. The problem is, once a reviewer is bought, he or she is bought for good. Although Gerstmann et al very likely had bugger all to do with advertising, complicity with the GameTrax thing is enough.
But you can bet that if anyone ever tried to directly sway our editorial, I’d blow a whistle so loud and hard it’d make your ears bleed.
A fool I may be for saying so, but I’d rather be an honest fool than a bent reviewer.
Peace out.
