Extreme review embargoes: the new normal?

There was a time when a review embargo that lifted close to launch meant one thing and one thing only: a dud of a game was forthcoming.

These days late review embargoes seems to have become the norm for all big releases. GTA V, surely a dead cert for positive reviews, had its embargo lifted just a day before it launched. Battlefield 4 launches in 6 hours from now and yet there is not a single review out there. In fact embargoes lifting on launch day are now incredibly common and some publishers are even using different embargo timetables for different SKUs of exactly the same game (see the fiasco surrounding the review embargoes for COD: Ghost for XB1 and PS4).

This trend appears, at first glance, to be at odds with the growing use of pre-order incentives that encourage early purchasing commitment. But is it actually at odds with this? Are publishers instead delberately trying to ween us off making buying decisions based on critical reception (a factor largely out of their control) and onto buying decisions based on marketing and sales tactics (over which they have complete control)? If so, where do these trends take us?

My assumption is that as time goes on reviews are slipping down the list of priorities people have when making buying decisions. If I had to guess, I bet a negative review holds a greater potential for chilling day one sales than a positive one has for increasing them.

If I'm a publisher I let reviews break on the same day as people can get hyped and buy my product. Grab some review quotes, run some ads and off we go.

The exception being a middle/low budget game that's targeted at hardcore gamers that's great but hasn't got much marketing behind it. You have to gamble and make reviews part of the lead up to launch.

Certis wrote:

My assumption is that as time goes on reviews are slipping down the list of priorities people have when making buying decisions. If I had to guess, I bet a negative review holds a greater potential for chilling day one sales than a positive one has for increasing them.

If I'm a publisher I let reviews break on the same day as people can get hyped and buy my product. Grab some review quotes, run some ads and off we go.

The exception being a middle/low budget game that's targeted at hardcore gamers that's great but hasn't got much marketing behind it. You have to gamble and make reviews part of the lead up to launch.

Does that not imply that game quality (as measured, albeit subjectively, by critical opinion) for the "upper" end of games is decreasing in importance? That is a somewhat slippery slope...

It is ironic too as there are now more reviewers than ever, even if most are amateur (or barely more than amateur). Also, wasn't there a phase a few years ago when developer bonuses and internal targets were linked to Metacritic scores?

gunjin wrote:

Does that not imply that game quality (as measured, albeit subjectively, by critical opinion) for the "upper" end of games is decreasing in importance? That is a somewhat slippery slope...

It is ironic too as there are now more reviewers than ever, even if most are amateur (or barely more than amateur). Also, wasn't there a phase a few years ago when developer bonuses and internal targets were linked to Metacritic scores?

I don't think the quality of a new BF4 or CoD:Whatevernext is what make them sell millions in the first days. Peoples expectations of what the games are, make them sell that.
I guess the quality of the previous game matters more than the quality of the actual game, when it comes to the big blockbusters.

The only thing a publisher can really gain from early reviews for those big sequels are lower expectations.

Review scores matters, but more for getting late buyers, and maybe for the next cycle. "We are releasing the sequel to that high-rated game! Be hyped!".

And of course for games that aren't well-established already.

gunjin wrote:

This trend appears, at first glance, to be at odds with the growing use of pre-order incentives that encourage early purchasing commitment. But is it actually at odds with this? Are publishers instead delberately trying to ween us off making buying decisions based on critical reception (a factor largely out of their control) and onto buying decisions based on marketing and sales tactics (over which they have complete control)? If so, where do these trends take us?

I lean more towards Certis' thinking, that a negative review will impact sales much more than a positive one. And unfortunately some groups seem to focus on criticism as a way to generate traffic, perhaps thinking the anti-establishment core gamer culture is more likely to believe a criticism is genuine whereas an accolade has been bought

But I also think it does go back to buying habits in general. My understanding is that most dollars in the industry don't come from people who play dozens of games a year after careful research on each, but instead from annualized sales from sequels of heavily marketed titles that unfortunately also need record-breaking marketing spends to hit those record-breaking sales. If that's the case, then the reviews of BF4 and COD are kinda irrelevant to the masses driving most of the sales volume initially.

Reviews and criticism does still play a very important role after launch though. It can inform DLC plans, it can inform features for the next sequel. Heck, it can even just keep attention on a game which in turn keeps teams employed for longer than it used to take to just hit gold master.

And I certainly won't criticize that

gunjin wrote:

Also, wasn't there a phase a few years ago when developer bonuses and internal targets were linked to Metacritic scores?

That is still a thing...

Certis wrote:

If I'm a publisher I let reviews break on the same day as people can get hyped and buy my product.

But there is a huge time gap there. Thanks to the AAA marketing machine, people can "get hyped" up to a full year before the day they can actually buy a game.

I would hope that reviews (and especially scores) are less important than they were several years ago. These days, on the day a game is released you can watch multiple people playing the game live on Twitch. And on Youtube you can watch Quick Looks, WTF Is, and Let's Play videos, either the day the game is released or at least within a week after release.

MeatMan wrote:

I would hope that reviews (and especially scores) are less important than they were several years ago. These days, on the day a game is released you can watch multiple people playing the game live on Twitch. And on Youtube you can watch Quick Looks, WTF Is, and Let's Play videos, either the day the game is released or at least within a week after release.

I guess I am a traditionalist then. I want to know how good a game is before I buy it. A demo provides a reasonable indication (unless it is made by Firaxis - but that's a different forum topic), LP vids provides further guidance but a set of good quality, impartial professional reviews is even better as it usually answers all of the questions i would have about a game. Preventing all this potential research taking place until after launch while bombarding gamers with pre-order incentives means that lots of people will simply make uninformed purchasing decisions. For many, this is clearly not an issue but for me this is a sad state of affairs.

Tkyl wrote:
gunjin wrote:

Also, wasn't there a phase a few years ago when developer bonuses and internal targets were linked to Metacritic scores?

That is still a thing... :sad:

So reviews are no longer important for gamers but remain critical for the developers? how bizarre...and sad as you say.

It is setting/has set up a situation where you have to assume a publisher is trying to bamboozle you unless they have a particularly good track record otherwise.

A sad state of affairs indeed.

edit: location edited for giggles.

I can't really blame the publishers for this decision, what with the rise of reviewers like Tom Chick and Phil Kollar who seem to take contrarian positions and rate AAA games low for page clicks(that is certainly my impression). I wouldn't want to give out code to reviewers who are just going to make their bones by destroying my investment.

Also, there isn't really a standard for review so scores are all over the place. I don't think aggregate scoring is a good thing, but there it is.

This just reinforces my move to wait to buy games until they are on sale and I have gotten gwj community reviews about them(excepting Batman and Dead Space games, those I will roll the dice on).

MeatMan wrote:
Certis wrote:

If I'm a publisher I let reviews break on the same day as people can get hyped and buy my product.

But there is a huge time gap there. Thanks to the AAA marketing machine, people can "get hyped" up to a full year before the day they can actually buy a game.

I would hope that reviews (and especially scores) are less important than they were several years ago. These days, on the day a game is released you can watch multiple people playing the game live on Twitch. And on Youtube you can watch Quick Looks, WTF Is, and Let's Play videos, either the day the game is released or at least within a week after release.

While I agree with your sentiment that scores should be meaningless, in a manner of speaking, everything else sans Let's Play is a review of a sort. Personally, I vastly prefer the 'scoreless review' of those types, or like those GWJ has been publishing to anything with a score attached, as though you could distill that much thought into a single digit integer.

As for review embargos, I think they're a bad idea. I do think that reviews are important to a lot of folks out there, and that any time you're restricting access to these people who essentially want to give you free/low cost publicity, refusing that bespeaks a lack of confidence in your product.

I've actually given up on reading reviews. For the true impression I usually look at the comments in the reviews, on podcasts and forums. Other than that I look at some gameplay videos on youtube.
Reviews just doesn't feel very reliable to me anymore.

I don't even know what to make of review scores anymore.

There's no centralized system in place. We'll have 5 reviews give out 5 scores for 5 completely different reasons using 5 unique scoring systems. Reviewers who use 5/5 or 5 Stars don't even translate well on Metacritic (4 stars = 75, 3 stars = 50, etc). For extra confusion, sites like Destructoid and Polygon are using the entire 10 point scale instead of the typical IGN 7 - 10 scale.

I wouldn't be surprised if these extreme embargoes become more commonplace because of popular review sites who don't mind giving a games a lower than average score.

Then there's a segment of the gaming population who can neither comprehend reviews nor handle criticism. The most recent example of this is GTA V: reviewers who didn't give it a perfect 10 were harassed and the game hadn't even been released yet. Reactions like this are usually followed by cries for "objective reviews"... Whatever that means.

Personally, I've given up on reading reviews. I rely on friends or go in blind.

I realize I'm in a minority of an already-small segment (core PC gamers), but for me, the lack of reviews means I generally don't pre-order stuff. It's not just worth it anymore. And then if the non-preorder price is enough worse than the pre-order price was, there's a good chance I won't buy the game at all, because I resent getting shafted that way.

I want to know, more or less, what I'm getting for my fifty bucks, before I spend the money, not after. And if I can't have that, I'm not going to drop sixty or sixty-five bones instead, a week after the reviews and user reactions are out. I'll wait until it drops to twenty. If I buy it at all.

edit to add:

I rely on friends or go in blind.

Yeah, I trust you folks a LOT more than I trust reviewers.

I don't care too much for user reactions because there's a lot of hate on the internet, there's a bunch of "ok" games that are decent to enjoy and they're criticized like they had a AAA budget. There's also the flip side in reviews, where games like GTAV get a bunch of good scores but tell you not to play them anyway because the reviewer felt personally slighted or something. Or you can sometimes tell the reviewer is so jaded that they can't enjoy anything. Or biased because it's a hyped game that bought a lot of ad space, etc.

There's also a problem with user reactions, they either go extremely positive or extremely negative, for the weirdest reasons, and it obviously varies from community to community. Hobby sites are so specialized that there's no mainstream anymore. So a game that you might have really liked 10 years ago when there was no internet (Say, the ghostbusters game) is now ignored because it got a 60 and comments of "Oh, it was average".

I agree the best way to see if you'll like a game are the "Let's play" videos. Or listening to guys on podcasts where you know you have similar game tastes (Like Elysium on the GWJ podcast, has similar taste in games to me).

edit: And doing reviews without a review score is not an improvement, to me, it's just a cop-out u_u

My buying purchases these days usually depend on what is on sale, and what other people think about a game, in comments or on blogs. I'm guessing this is the case for most people really into gaming around my age (almost 30). I honestly get more indie games than AAA games these days, mostly because they are cheaper, and they are more interesting to play than the new CoD or Battlefield.

I don't think I'd ever pre-order anything anymore, since the price of a game can usually be cut in half in a few months time. Reviews wouldn't really change that. A game series I really, really like I'll probably get on day one, after making sure it wasn't buggy as heck, since I really want to play the game, but I'd never pre-order a game anymore. I just don't want to support the whole "we'll cut out different parts of the game for different stores and sell it that way" model.

It sucks that developers get stung by metacritic these days, review scores are pretty subjective, based on which reviewer you get, and these days it seems like the more sequels and marketing you have, the more reviewers will ever just give it a 9/10 because you don't want commentors to give you death threats, or be contrarian and give it an abnormally low mark just to get more popularity/clicks. So it's kinda a lose/lose all around for reviews.

The only companies/people I can see winning out on reviews are indie groups that have a great new idea, and can use a review to generate more word of mouth, and the people getting paid to write the reviews. I can imagine for AAA companies, a review is something they need to control so it doesn't interfere with their carefully created marketing plan (I guess this sort of thing is also a reason I don't buy many more AAA games anymore).

Mex wrote:

And doing reviews without a review score is not an improvement, to me, it's just a cop-out u_u

I'm curious why you feel that way. If you read a person's review, you'll know exactly how he/she feels about the game, and (hopefully) you'll get details about different aspects of the game. Just looking at a number tells you nothing specific about the game.

Not sure if the original post that started this talk was Adam Sessler's frustrated tweets over the weekend but he indirectly talks about this in his latest Sessler's Something.

MeatMan wrote:
Mex wrote:

And doing reviews without a review score is not an improvement, to me, it's just a cop-out u_u

I'm curious why you feel that way. If you read a person's review, you'll know exactly how he/she feels about the game, and (hopefully) you'll get details about different aspects of the game. Just looking at a number tells you nothing specific about the game.

Well, I don't mean I need a review score like "8.3% in fun!", I think a simple "Play/Pass/Only buy on sale" rating would be much more helpful. The point of a review is just to help you figure out if a game is good, and if you should spend money on it, no? And with the "Games journalism" you sometimes get frankly terrible "reviews" that don't mean anything except "Trying to be deep about video games, not helping you much in figuring out if you should buy this". I'd rather call those "impressions" or just "articles", and those are cool, I think that's what the GWJ podcast guys do and it helps, but they're not exactly reviews...

edit: There's also the problem with game reviewers that for instance, played Simcity, thought they were just bad at the game but were impressed with the graphics, told by EA "Yeah, we'll fix it by release!" and then gave the game a 9. A lot of time you can tell game reviewers aren't exactly very good at games, or they spend so much time reviewing that they don't get deep into a game and simply can't tell you "You can safely put 300 hours into this game and it will mark your life", or "About 50 hours into this game you'll hate it due to the ending" or things like that. It's a weird thing, reviewing video games, lots of problems involved.

The only real use for reviews for me, comes more from finding reviewers you can repeatedly understand/relate to, when they review a game.
If I've agreed with 10 other RPG reviews by reviewer X, and he then give some game 9/10, that at least seems like a useful information - even before reading the arguments. As in, should I bother to read more or not. Whereas some average score on metacritic arent so useful.

I sometimes look up games on metacritic, if I see a recommendation of an old game I haven't head about. Since finding user talk on forums can be much harder, and even less reliable, for an old game. Tbh user information can be even less useful than reviews, unless you are carefully selecting your sources.

I'm kinda looking at the metacritic scores in a binary way.
Did it get less than 50? Chances are it was really bugged/terrible (due to the weird standard of 80 being average), and simply not worth checking out further, no matter what qualities might be buried in there.
More mixed reviews? Might be worth looking for more/better information elsewhere.

Pretty much just a quick way to get an idea if it is worth spending more time searching for better information.

You also need to reflect on the fact that these extreme embargoes are actually a more fair and ethical way of doing things. The truth is that review embargoes until the day of release were always in place. The difference is that it used to be much more common for publishers to allow some sites to print their reviews ahead of the embargo - provided the review was positive enough. This practice has been dying out. This is what led to the recurring phenomenon of Metacritic scores being very high until after the game was already out.

kuddles wrote:

You also need to reflect on the fact that these extreme embargoes are actually a more fair and ethical way of doing things. The truth is that review embargoes until the day of release were always in place. The difference is that it used to be much more common for publishers to allow some sites to print their reviews ahead of the embargo - provided the review was positive enough. This practice has been dying out. This is what led to the recurring phenomenon of Metacritic scores being very high until after the game was already out.

Yup, I certainly agree that the the exclusive review concept was deeply flawed but that does not mean that the embargo should only lift on release day. Doing it a week beforehand with no exclusives would allow gamers to work out whether the game is for them AND take advantage of a pre-release offer that would otherwise disappear on the same day that the reviews hit.

I play whatever ClockworkHouse hates.

I feel like it's a consequence of the accelerating news cycle. It used to be that you'd check out a review of a game in EGM a month before it came out, and that would keep the game in your mind the next time you went to the store. Now, there's video game news 24 hours a day, and if you read a review and the game isn't immediately available, you're likely to just forget about it completely. Game companies want you to see their product everywhere on launch day, and that means holding back as much as they can until the last minute.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I play whatever ClockworkHouse hates.

Pretty solid advice.