The Seedy Side of the Gaming Biz.
Jason at Unfettered Blather relates a story about a gaming company CEO on a rampage. He has an intersting bit about how much we should care about “bias” in the gaming press. In a nutshell, Jason’s point was that if you’re not making any income off of a game, you don’t really have any bias towards it. Not sure if I agree 100% with that but in this particular case I do agree.
The article Jason linked to was from Bill Harris’s blog dubious quality, in a post that gave most of the gritty details about the “scandal” between notable game reviewer Tom Chick and the CEO of Kerberos, Martin Cirulis. Apparently this Cirulis guy likes to play Net Nazi and do whatever he can to prevent all the bad press about his sucky games, the latest being the game of “dubious quality” called Sword of the Stars. Apparently this is some kind of turn based space themed strategy game.
Tom Chick wrote a scathing review of Sword of the Stars, and Cirulis is accusing Chick of being unethical because he wrote a manual for Galactic Civilizations II. Never mind the fact that almost no other reviewer has liked Sword of the Stars so far. Chick gave it one of the lowest scores, 4 out of 10, but the reviews for it have all been under 80% on GameRankings with many in the lower range than that.
Did Tom have some bias? Well sure, everyone is biased about pretty much everything. There is no such thing as a non-biased review. But was Tom’s bias financially motivated? No. Not in this case, his work on GalCiv2 was on a contractual basis and he was paid a flat fee. He’s not going to make any more money on GalCiv2 if people decide to buy it instead of SotS. So yes, Chick is biased, like anyone, but his bias is based purely on his previous gaming experiences, not on any kind of financial opportunity. I see nothing ethically wrong with Tom reviewing a game just because he has previous experience with games in the genre. He may be a GalCiv2 fanboy, but that could be just about any reviewer.
Bill’s main point was this:
When has this strategy of attacking your critics EVER worked for a gaming company? Has it ever generated goodwill and additional sales? I can’t remember a single gaming example where this didn’t end very, very badly. This never works. And somebody at Kerberos should have had the stones to say that to Cirulis before the post-demo forum messages started getting out of hand, because those messages absolutely killed any good will the company had built up over the game.
I agree 100% with Bill on that point. In being this anti-press and anti-free speech, by slamming reviewers, deleting posts on their forums, and such, all they have done is make me not even want to look at their demo. I now will have zero interest in games from Kerberos. Not just this Stars game but ALL of them. I can’t trust them to be honest about their own work. Any company can make a bad game, but the ones that try to silence the critics are the ones that I can’t stand.
What do you think about this situation? Tell me in the comments!
Update: added more links.
I’m not ruling out bias altogether, but saying the bias is financially motivated doesn’t hold water in this case.
I see reviewer bias all the time. We don’t ding reviewers for bias anymore than we do news anchors. If a reviewer can quantify what they don’t like about a game that is what I am interested in.
That is also not to say that his work on the GalCivII manual doesn’t give him bias as it very well may. I’ve seen people with the attitude of “I’ve worked on Linux so I don’t want to work with AIX” for instance. They don’t make any more money either way. Is there bias? Possibly. Is it financially motivated? No, not if you consider financial motivation to be bias that actually helps put dollars into pockets.
Comment by Jason O — October 6, 2006 @ 2:23 pm
Thanks for the comments. I basically agree with you. I will concede that Tom Chick is most likely pretty fanatical about his Gal Civ, but that doesn’t mean he can not objectively look at a competing product. He’s a professional reviewer, for chrissakes, he does this shit all the time. I am a Blizzard fanboy, I love almost everything they make, but I can still play other RPGs and be objective about my criticism of them (or praise). I would actually think it would be harder for Tom to be objective about reviewing GalCiv2 than it would be for other strategy games. I’d probably give his GalCiv2 review much less weight than some other reviewer’s.
Comment by virtuadept — October 6, 2006 @ 3:50 pm