Do triple A companies intimidate or pressure journalists for good reviews?

[UnifiedDivide]

Where this unearned confidence in this knowledge comes from I'll never know.

This is one of the larger unsolved mysteries of the average "gamer." Just supreme confidence in things they know next to nothing about.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

This is one of the larger unsolved mysteries of the average "gamer." Just supreme confidence in things they know next to nothing about.

Not an unsolved mystery. It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

[beanman12345]

Access is extremely important for journalism. You ever watch the news, interviewing a politician, and they get easy questions, cause they want the politician to come back on their show at another point to continue to be asked softball questions. It's why when you read a interview with a game dev, and they are all no pressure, borderline stupid questions, it's because they want the dev to give them interviews later. You ask them the hard hitting stuff, then they don't want to come back to interview on their next project, and you lose that access. So yes, hard hitting journalism is super rare because of that. Game journalism is no exception, in fact it's actually worse in gaming journalism. They're also given free shit all the time, and much earlier to the public and it's all very easy to become corrupted by it all. I'm not saying it's everyone, but yes, it's very much true that the game journalists generally skew heavily in favor then against especially the big companies, unless something or someone changes their mind on that.

[UnifiedDivide]

Not an unsolved mystery. It's called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Fair point lol

[Fencers]

This is one of the larger unsolved mysteries of the average "gamer." Just supreme confidence in things they know next to nothing about.

This entire forum is full of people that have supreme confidence in their opinion as an objective and universal fact. Even when they clearly are misusing terms, phrases, and idioms, and not understanding processes, business, science, etc.

I once saw someone on this forum offer their knowledge as an expert on knots. Like this dude worked at a naval museum or something. They offered a well-reasoned explanation of something.

Like 10 people argued with an expert on knots.

I moderated this forum, other forums, and subreddits. I have never seen a consistently convinced user base their opinion is an objective truth as the MMO-C user base.

[Ghost of Cow]

This entire forum is full of people that have supreme confidence in their opinion as an objective and universal fact. Even when they clearly are misusing terms, phrases, and idioms, and not understanding processes, business, science, etc.

I once saw someone on this forum offer their knowledge as an expert on knots. Like this dude worked at a naval museum or something. They offered a well-reasoned explanation of something.

Like 10 people argued with an expert on knots.

I moderated this forum, other forums, and subreddits. I have never seen a consistently convinced user base their opinion is an objective truth as the MMO-C user base.

I mean, a lot of that applies to present company as well. You yourself have been embroiled on countless occasions in debates where you try to inform people that "feelings aren't real, you can't feel something about a game" and such oddly robotic logic.

[Fencers]

I mean, a lot of that applies to present company as well. You yourself have been embroiled on countless occasions in debates where you try to inform people that "feelings aren't real, you can't feel something about a game" and such oddly robotic logic.

I have never said such a thing or debated anything of the sort.

I have said how you feel about gameplay isn't the mechanical process of gameplay. Regardless of how you feel about Mario's jump, it works in X manner when you press Y button. That doesn't require expertise. It's the only way that jump works.

[StillMcfuu]

Short answer is yes but it's complicated. But it's not forcing publications to do what they want and more along the lines of not giving publications review access or giving it to them later than other pubs.

It's happened with EA if I recall, one of their games got a bad review and EA threatened to not give timely review access to the entire magazine if the game wasn't "re reviewed". The story leaked 2 or 3 years afterwards by a editor showing the emails.
I recall a couple of cases through the years. But the implication exists and it shows in major publications, I think it's one of the bigger factors in major pubs slow down roll.

This isn't even a strictly game journalism issue, Ferrari famously banned Chris Harris from driving their cars, the reason is because of a bad review. Tesla banned Top Gear magazine/show from reviewing Teslas for a bit, Clarkson even made a bit out of it when finally getting to review the Model Y.
The issue isn't as nefarious for car reviews vs game reviews. The Chris Harris situation came up because Ferrari firmly believes they make the pinnacle of cars, according to them, there is no such thing as a bad Ferrari. Tesla is along the same lines, TG put the Tesla Roadster on full display with all its issues, overheating, poor track battery performance, etc.., shit Tesla still has some of these issues. But at the time Tesla couldn't have a reviewer attacking the drive train, because Tesla is known for the drive train and it should be perfect. Not a surprise Tesla pivoted to a more "tech" company after this time.
For video games, reviewers always get the whole thing and that's what they are looking at, in an entirety. Unless your Skyrim, you usually don't get away with a high score while being a buggy mess. This is where pubs have stepped on with pressure. The prevelance of day 1 patches don't help either, often game reviews aren't on the game the customer gets.

[Tech614]

Short answer is yes but it's complicated. But it's not forcing publications to do what they want and more along the lines of not giving publications review access or giving it to them later than other pubs.

It's happened with EA if I recall, one of their games got a bad review and EA threatened to not give timely review access to the entire magazine if the game wasn't "re reviewed". The story leaked 2 or 3 years afterwards by a editor showing the emails.
I recall a couple of cases through the years. But the implication exists and it shows in major publications, I think it's one of the bigger factors in major pubs slow down roll.

This isn't even a strictly game journalism issue, Ferrari famously banned Chris Harris from driving their cars, the reason is because of a bad review. Tesla banned Top Gear magazine/show from reviewing Teslas for a bit, Clarkson even made a bit out of it when finally getting to review the Model Y.
The issue isn't as nefarious for car reviews vs game reviews. The Chris Harris situation came up because Ferrari firmly believes they make the pinnacle of cars, according to them, there is no such thing as a bad Ferrari. Tesla is along the same lines, TG put the Tesla Roadster on full display with all its issues, overheating, poor track battery performance, etc.., shit Tesla still has some of these issues. But at the time Tesla couldn't have a reviewer attacking the drive train, because Tesla is known for the drive train and it should be perfect. Not a surprise Tesla pivoted to a more "tech" company after this time.
For video games, reviewers always get the whole thing and that's what they are looking at, in an entirety. Unless your Skyrim, you usually don't get away with a high score while being a buggy mess. This is where pubs have stepped on with pressure. The prevelance of day 1 patches don't help either, often game reviews aren't on the game the customer gets.

Eh, almost all the cases of publishers doing this are not for low review scores. It's usually because the reviewer didn't follow embargo instructions or the publication is reporting leaks the publisher didn't want out there. It's a huge myth that big publishers pressure for good reviews, if that was true madden wouldn't get shitty reviews on a yearly basis.

Like a more recent case would be CDPR heavily limiting early review codes to Cyberpunk to make sure reviewers where only playing it on 3000 series GPUs but this isn't pressuring reviewers for high scores this is them knowing their game was going to review poorly on weaker hardware and trying to control the early narrative so the first reviews didn't express how truly broken the game was.