The writing was on the wall when Jeff Gerstmann was fired over a bad review back in 2007. The whole game journalism industry has been on life support since then, and realistically been shafted ever since we went from purchased magazines to online.

Even then magazines would find themselves without timely review copies if they were not sympathetic to the need for good reviews.

[–] PunchingWood@lemmy.world 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It's all about the money. When they give honest bad reviews they'll end up not being invited to play early review copies, thus missing out and falling behind on the wave.

I think true journalism hardly exists anymore. Feels like most genuine reviews come from people that aren't paid to do the reviews by either the site/magazine publisher they're working for or the developer/publisher offering the game for review.

So many articles on big websites feel like they read entirely like AI-generated content. Some don't even bother to hide it, they might just as well be old school RSS-feeds at this point.

[–] bouh@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

Well, if capitalism could tolerate true journalism, journalists would be paid like managers.