Reviewers and Marketing

An unholy union.

We all have that one IGN opinion, don't we? Our exasperated reaction to what has to be one of the largest, yet most clowned on, official gaming publications in the entire industry. And the world, for that matter. IGN has one of the biggest chunks of online gaming presence, they're first fiddle to just about every single premiere on the market, they cover TV shows and movies at the same time, and they're perhaps one of the only stable career choices a gaming journalist can hope to make. But games journalists are already a questionable breed of people, now aren't they? For their debateable relevance and job performance standards, as well as their seemingly obvious lack of passion for their chosen vocation which always seems to bleed out in bitter and resentful articles that seem to drunkenly lash out in every direction without rhythm or reason. So what happens when you bring a whole collective of journalists together into one connected group? Pandemonium.

But IGN is much bigger than it's reviewing arm; heck it's an entire media empire at this point! Chock full of reaction-opinion content, watch along parties for all major gaming events, and press coverage out the wazoo; ensuring they can buff up their own viewership by feeding off the marketing campaigns of all other games. And I mean all other; they don't seem to care who gives them money, as long as they bring the potential for an audience along with them. I don't quite know what kind of parasite this makes IGN, but not a particularly fun one to follow. I bet most games industry people watch IGN these days without being fans, because that's just what you are supposed to do in order to keep abreast with the industry moves. IGN are the one's who made it this way, and they lorde it out on top of their pack for a reason.

Of course, IGN are by no means the only such publication; their example has spawned a cadre of identical eye-brow raising 'experts' who formulate their actionable opinions on the products they review by merit of wavy talents. It's not as if anyone is saying you need to be a gaming expert in order to pen a review, but perhaps getting people who actually like games would be a decent start- but alas we are doomed to suffer a reality where the industry is beset by absolute heels from every turn. Imagine if all movie critics absolutely could not stand the theatre, or watching long-form media- it's that level of insanity over here in gaming and we see this ugly truth reflected out of the dull empty-hearted articles pouring out of mainstream outlets with disappointment after disappointment.

Who remembers the Cuphead debacle from Gamesbeat? The situation in which an early player of the game's tutorial found themselves utterly incapable of pushing through the tutorial level of the game because it required them to jump atop a platform. Now to be absolutely fair to Gamesbeat, they had good humour about this. The player in question was no fan of platformers, they kind of set him up to fail by throwing it at him in the first place, and the video was uploaded as a kind of group shamefest for everyone to laugh along with. I hope the player was laughing as well. But I'm afraid to say that even though this particular video was made with the joke to mind, the perception it reinforces about the competency of video game reviewers is no illusion.

I mean, Ploygon's legendarily embarrassing footage of a player attempting DOOM's intro so pathetically it seems they've never even touched a First Person Shooter before is spectacle enough. The footage is bad, with the player standing still and getting mauled, seemingly unable to aim and move at the same time, and missing point-blank shots it should be honestly impossible to screw up on. And there really isn't a punch line to this one. This was footage that Ploygon shot and for some reason didn't immediately delete upon review; this one made it out to the public. And the message it sent: Yeah, our reviewers aren't really hobbyists for the games that they play... but, oh well- right? It certainly painted an aura of mistrust next time around when DOOM Eternal started getting critics grumbling about it's alleged difficulty.

And whilst we're doing the round trip, why not land at Gamespot's door for a spell? That's right, you didn't think I'd miss an opportunity to talk about the Miles Morales review, did you? A classic review, full of vigor, wherein the reviewer seems to struggle to come up with things to say about a game which was essentially just a bloated out DLC pack for the original Spiderman. (Not to knock the quality of Miles Morales, but we should call a spade a spade when we see it.) During which we got gifted the gloriously bizarre sentence "The way he leaps off of buildings and flips backwards to face the camera is full of the exaggerated swagger of a black teen, I get goosebumps everytime I see it." Which is just an objectively insane sentiment. That Gamespot thought an adequate defence for that statement was to go "Actually- the guy who wrote that review was black!"- is laughable.

Which brings me around to the latest kerfuffle; IGN's contribution to the shaky train that is the Redfall marketing. The game hasn't had a great go of it's reveals, with battles with the public over apt comparisons to the general vibe that this game doesn't feel as fresh and different as some of Arkane's other outings. Perhaps they thought giving people the chance to play the game and get that footage out would waive some concerns, and for some of the smaller creators the output of gameplay was soothing. The game does look pretty fun. But for the biggest of the outlets, IGN... woah, those guys are experts at not being experts. The gameplay is painful, just slightly better than the DOOM footage in that I believe this guy has played First Person Shooters before- but he just doesn't enjoy them in the slightest.

For a marketing video to score badly with the public is already a big kick to the ego, but for the reason of that disdain to not be the game itself but the people playing it... well, that's certainly raising questions about the worth of lukewarm platforms like IGN when it comes to supporting the game industry they leech off to survive. Compare that with grass-routes creators, like the 2.2 million viewed video of the ID Software team meeting up with huge DOOM fan Markiplier and having him rock out the game at it's highest difficulty setting whilst talking about how important the game was to him growing up- that's the kind of stuff that turns heads. Yeah, I didn't intend to make another blog basically saying "Trad media sucks" but here we are... guess it's a sentiment that writes itself, huh?