Do journalists in other fields get showered with as many gifts as video game reviewers and journalists do month after month? And yes, the payola arrives courtesy the publishers they’re supposed to be objectively writing reviews and stories about.
Do journalists in other fields get showered with as many gifts as video game reviewers and journalists do month after month? And yes, the payola arrives courtesy the publishers they’re supposed to be objectively writing reviews and stories about.
lol, this is barely, barely scraping the surface of the sort of payola that goes on in the game biz.
Hell, I got a game journo on my blog admitting to “playing ball” with the games companies, so he at least gets points for owning up, in public, so to speak.
And the best part is, most of them don’t see a damn thing wrong w/ it (see Kotaku linked here boasting about it) and they wont stop unless the fans really, really start screaming about it. (Which they won’t because, by and large, they either don’t care or they have the attention spans of disemboweled mayflies.)
Voila: new post with credit due to Mr.Loftus (reading Kotaku so I don’t have to):
http://waxingerratic.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/trust-me-im-a-game-journalist/
Years ago my network ran a series on this exact practice.
We exposed a wide range or journalist/publisher/publication ethics violations.
Even had a round table with then Editor In Chief of EGM Dan Hsu who spoke at length about the relationship of publisher ads to review scores.
Shameful business, really.