3 ms·

Why do you feel that's an extraordinary claim?

• eropple 9y ago
  Because I'm familiar with both the games press and games PR. I understand how those interactions work well enough to be very, very skeptical. There is some minor possibility of good reviews in exchange for advertising--except that sales and content at any outlet significant enough to be called the "games press", from Kotaku to Giant Bomb, has a wall between sales and content and publishers (when they bother to notice the games press at all) know that bad scores are, occasionally, just part of the package. The last major break of that I can think of was Gamespot and Jeff Gerstmann, and the people involved in causing that were so roundly shredded that I don't even think most of them are in the industry anymore. So while vanishingly unlikely, sure, there's a possibility of payola there. But getting paid for bad reviews? Come on. Substantiate--with evidence--those wild claims or don't make them. If he'd said "games YouTube"--now, that's a different thing, as the interactions between influencers and publishers (in ways that are deleterious to the public, to be honest) are pretty well-documented across the board in ways that are not "some rando with an anime avatar said so". But even they aren't incentivized in any way that I've ever, not once, seen substantiated to give bad reviews. So, again, that's a put-up-or-shut-up.