Precisely. Here is the kicker: who advertises in video game magazines more than anyone else? Video game distributors – the same people whose products get reviewed in these things. Can you say “conflict of interest?”

If the site or magazine pumps out a really bad review, a game maker may actually consider pulling their ads, and seriously reconsider ever letting that magazine do an “exclusive preview”. It has already happened btw, and a GameSpot reviewer got canned to appease Edios who didn’t like his bad Kane and Lynch review.

It’s sad but true – if a magazine antagonizes a game maker, they might be jeopardizing their advertising revenue stream.

hmm.. if the magazines making money are all stuffed full of previews and have crappy reviewing, and the blogs with proper reviewing instead of previews aren’t making money, then I guess there must be something preventing the good thing from profiting over the bad thing.

It could be that a very large market segment is stupid, and wants to go “OMG lookit this thing coming out in 6 months, those pre-rendered not-in-game graphics look hawt, will buy”. Whilst the rest of us are rolling our eyes and checking out the blog reviews. But that seems uncharitable – you have to hope that gamers as a whole have a high enough average intelligence that this wouldn’t be the case.

I’m going to guess it’s advertising related… or possibly that the magazines are actually paid to generate hype about the upcoming game in question. Either way it seems kinda corrupt…

LOL!

Added humor: I almost mechanically deleted the post from the moderation queue due to the high volume of “hey, great post – I think you should expand it and buY V14gR4!” spam. :mrgreen:

Great post.

I give it a 4.5 out of 5 stars.

:)