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Giant Bomb |OT 12| Oops All Gokus
- Thread starter Death Metalist
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Well, obviously it's only because everyone was mad, but your Oscar experience will be complete.
Yeah it's gonna be the followup to Mile High Club. Gonna be fun.
YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID
<3
Agreed. But they walked back the category changes like every other stupid decision. Let's see if they can make yet another one and rewind it before Sunday.
But they had to know that there would be some sort of outcry, removing those categories was the most idiotic decision ever. I'm happy they're back.
They're caught between trying to be a serious movie awards show and the reality that less and less people watch every year because they don't give The Avengers Best Picture.
Serious award show went out the window the moment Ellen started vacuum cleaning.
Me, a week ago:
The Brad summoning worked
I'm just getting home from a (motherfucking 5-hour) drive and eating while I catch up on this whole Ybarra thing, and boy, between Alex & Jeff's tweets and Brad coming in and laying down facts, this is why I follow Giant Bomb. They don't stay quiet when some executive spews shit like this. If only this happened before the Bombcast, imagine how tired and angry Jeff would have been.
32 or 33 I believe.
Once you find a route it's gonna be alllll muscle memory.
brad will get flashbacks to bbcod4
tango down in section one alpha tango down in section one alpha
tango down in section one alpha tango down in section one alpha
Stakes might overall be lower than some other businesses, but a bad review for a game from a notable/trusted outlet can have a cascading effect that impacts the livelihoods of many people (or even a few people more significantly). Most AAA games are more expensive in terms of pure dev cost than all but the most intense CGI films. When you add in marketing it can get ridiculous, even if you're not paying for multiple (or even necessarily one) award-winning actors to to voice or do motion-capture. Notable voice actors who are primarily voice actors are still going to be way cheaper than notable screen actors, especially Oscar-winning or "hot" ones. Like, no one is hiring Meryl Streep for their video game, or even Emma Stone. You're much more likely to get someone like Jennifer Hale or Nolan North, and even then that's two of the most prolific and respected voice actors, so they're still going to be significantly more expensive compared to Morgan from the cafeteria or whatever, as an extreme example.
It has been well-documented that review cutoffs as well as sales metrics can be used against developers to withhold monetary bonuses among other things, as illustrated by the well-publicized case of Bethesda refusing to pay out bonuses to Obsidian over a 1-point deficit from an arbitrary Metacritic goal of 85 or higher. There are enough other cases in the industry to go around. And that's just for the more technical developers shipping a product that isn't even a new IP (spinoff standalone expansion in the same engine), let alone a GaaS beyond some standard DLC packs. It has been documented that even in the "best" studios and often the "best" ones as well that extended crunch without appropriate compensation is a very real thing, even if the crunch itself isn't as intense across all studios. Not even counting other game studio workers that provide community management or customer support. QA as a more core development job is often particularly thankless.
So yeah, you could work on a game for 2+ years, maybe crunching a significant portion of that at 50-60+ or even more hours a week at sub-standard pay for the tech industry at large, let alone the games industry, to meet internal milestones and other deadlines, and then some big enough critic comes along who probably doesn't have much more than a bachelors degree in Journalism or English if that, or even a deeper background in tech, games, or whatever specific genre of games and decide that your game isn't up to whatever standard they might have, causing you to lose out on a significant bonus. Which isn't chump change in the places most game studios are located in the West especially.
To the original topic: I think game reviewers especially ARE threatened by streamers and people that record gameplay videos for YouTube or wherever because easily accessible gameplay footage/early impressions is something that game journalists alone were privy to.
PAX (and other conventions) as an open convention eventually forced E3's hand to become open to the public, as something that was previously only promotional for devs/investors/journalists.
The primary thing a standard streamer/YouTuber won't have is insider industry access and connections to do real investigative reporting outside of more public information like job openings or descriptions. But pretty much anyone can pony up $60 or whatever and post a review (text/podcast/video) once it's released to the public. The barrier to entry there is extremely low. The only question in that regard is if you have enough money or time to review everything notable. Smaller platforms certainly won't have the money to sustain the release rate of games themselves these days (even if you only covered AAA stuff), but they might have the time. Larger platforms might have the money, but not the time to cover everything or cover everything in-depth. It's a classic paradox.
For the record I encourage the calling out of bullshit by all parties involved in anything.
Well that's a condemnation of Fallout 76 if I've ever seen one. And I mostly agree on the Anthem description, but since at least PC players (and Xbox players too I guess) have the option of demoing the full product for a month for $15, I don't think it looks bad at all. Let alone the $5 or less 10-hour trial. I probably wouldn't spend $60 on the thing, but like I've said before I don't spend $60 on hardly any game.
The only game on the horizon that I'd be willing to drop that much or more on would be Cyberpunk 2077 because it really scratches some pleasure points for me, even if it doesn't fully live up to the gameplay demo, let alone the other early trailers, especially coming off of The Witcher 3. It's a also a game I'd be willing to drop $2000 on a complete new gaming PC for, or buy a VR headset for if there's VR support, which is another $300+ probably. Am I overhyped? Probably, but no game in any recent stretch of ever has done a fully cyberpunk story as well as 2077 is shaping up to.
The God must be real because there's no fucking way that happens.
He's not going to intuit that.
(That said, like Mile High Club, it doesn't look that terrible once you figure out a good route.)
the fact that publishers hold dev teams hostage to review scores is a publisher problem because in five years (or now) they will hold them hostage to 'influencer opinion' or whatever the fuck that means. Don't put that shit on reviewers, reviewers write for their outlet and their audience. They don't write for the dev team's paycheque.
land in a good spot, find decent loot, six squads left, zipline to move towards the circle, obliterated by a squad camping up there before we can even react
apex
apex
Christ at this point I'm considering moving my Anthem preorder over to something else even though I got it from in-store credit I'd never use elsewhere, but I also have anything else I could give a shit about preordered from the same credit.
That said I do still kinda have to know, I guess.
That said I do still kinda have to know, I guess.
And I'm saying there's usually a lot more personal/professional overlap between professional reviewers and developers/publishers than there is for most streamers/influencers/etc. to developers/publishers. To deny that is denying reality. Even if there isn't anything shadier than a friendly co-worker relationship going on, I can probably easily identify at least half a dozen prominent former games coverage writers (and not just any writers, but ones that were well respected and worked at well-respected publications for their time) that have gone on to work in PR for game dev studios, if not writing or some other sort design work. A couple have even risen to lead roles if not founding/co-founding their own game dev studios.
It's not really any different than the revolving door between lobbyists and public officials/lawmakers. The "regulatory capture" might not be as dense, and the stakes may not be as high most of the time, but it's certainly a thing.
Two more notable examples off the top of my head of games enthusiast press jumping to dev work are Greg Kasavin at Supergiant Games — listed as former site director and executive editor/editor-in-chief at GameSpot for over 10 years. He worked at both EA and 2K before joining Supergaint.
Luke Smith worked at Kotaku and made a name for himself at 1UP as a writer and news editor before being hired by Bungie, eventually becoming a design lead for Destiny 1 and Game Director for Destiny 2. 1UP at the time was considered pretty much one of the (very few, maybe also Edge) gold standards in gaming press, at least for online content, and certainly for podcasts.
There's plenty of other 1UP/EGM alumni that went to work at various game studios. If we want to talk even television personalities, Adam Sessler is the president of a media/entertainment consulting firm now, while Morgan Webb works at Bonfire Studios, an indie house made up mostly of some high-end former Blizzard staff, after she worked for Blizzard herself for some time. Bonfire here not to be confused with the Ensemble carry-over of the same name which was acquired by Zynga and renamed.
The Blizzard-Alum Bonfire still hasn't produced anything yet, not even a teaser, but they have some serious heavy hitters like Wei Wang, Rob Pardo, Josh Mosquiera and more. If you look at even just those 3 CVs, the talent/pedigree is off the charts. On a scale of 1-10 it's not just an 11, but like a 17.
The point being that game dev work isn't really all that glamorous and often doesn't pay that well, but games journalism is gonna be even less glamorous and lucrative than that on average across the industry (though pretty much all journalism has been in a slump).
So conflicts of interest definitely do regularly occur because most games journalism isn't something most games journalists can really subsist on long term, even compared to game dev work. Although the journalism side might be more steady in terms of work to actually do vs. the frequent use of contractors in place of salaried/benefits employees and the boom/bust cycle of most dev projects (shipped games.) An arcade cabinet in the break room doesn't go as far as good health coverage in the U.S. or general financial stability worldwide.
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So a few things.
1. None of that shit is on reviewers? Metacritic bonuses are entirely the result of the (incredibly bad) deal the publishers made with the developers. That's not an agreement the reviewers entered into at all and any results of them giving a bad review should not be on them; hell, for the sake of integrity it explicitly shouldn't be considered. And what are you even trying to say when you're going on about the education of this hypothetical reviewer (and: actually... lol, do you realize what thread you're in)? That they need a college education to truly value the crunch these developers put into a game...? Do you somehow get less fucked over by your employer/publisher if someone with a masters degree and industry experience gives your game a 4/10? This line of thinking is outright nonsensical.
2. Do we even know if these Metacritic deals still happen? Because I sure feel like I haven't heard about any in years and yet people keep bringing them up when this topic comes up.
3. This is incredibly irrelevant to begin with because none of the recent overblown "controversies" over the supposed incompetence of journalists related in the fucking slightest to a significant shift in scoring. Actually, several of them had nothing to do with reviews.
Only if he makes a celebrity run away while saying "is he gonna fuckin hit me"
Ha nice that the new Breaking Brad is a Titanfall 2 campaign playthrough. Is Titanfall 2 super hard? Or is he playing it on the highest difficulty to truly make it Breaking Brad?
seriously I don't understand the points being made here
are these the supposed journalists who were bad and failed upwards, or...
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