On Tuesday, Bethesda Softworks – publisher of popular game series The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, as well as renowned games like Wolfenstein, Doom, and Dishonored – announced it would no longer provide reviewers access to its unreleased games until 24 hours before launch. It’s a policy that upends decades of gamers being able to rely on impartial critics to provide them an idea of a game’s quality when it goes on sale.We think this policy is damaging – for informed gamers, for games criticism in general, and even for Bethesda.
Obviously, Bethesda’s games are its property to do with as it pleases, and there is certainly nothing requiring them to be submitted for review. However, there is a reason providing early access to critics has been the standard practice in the games industry (as well as film, books, etc) since the very beginning: It’s a show of good faith. Allowing independent critics to evaluate a product and recommend it accordingly is a courtesy to consumers, and a demonstration that publishers and developers have confidence in the thing they’re asking you to spend money on and in the review process.
When we look ahead to Dishonored 2 next month, and the rebooted Prey and Quake Champions in 2017, I’m optimistic – they all look like they could be winners, and I’m rooting for all of them (as I do for every game that shows potential). But I’m also cautious, because we only have to look as far back as this year’s incredibly disappointing No Man’s Sky to see what can happen when a game that looks amazing in developer-controlled previews (such as the IGN First coverage, in which we weren’t allowed to play long enough to see its faults) comes out and doesn’t live up to expectations. That’s the main thing reviews are intended to safeguard against.
Most developers love to get critical feedback.
In its blog post announcing the new policy, Bethesda’s Global Content Lead Gary Steinman (who I once worked for when he was editor-in-chief of PC Gamer in 2009) states, “At Bethesda, we value media reviews.” I absolutely believe that to be true. Many developers, like most other creators, love to get critical feedback on something they’ve been working hard on for years – especially when it’s positive, or when it points out issues they were on the fence about and can learn from. There’s also the bragging rights of earning higher review scores than their competitors, and of course the increased exposure that comes from having a review featured on popular sites, bringing awareness of their games’ existence to new potential customers.
We know developers and publishers appreciate reviews for all of those reasons, and perhaps there are more. But to most critics – and all of us at IGN – those are all side-effects. We’re not writing reviews for developers’ sake. They are not our audience, and we don’t presume to know more about game design than game designers do. We review games for you, for the express purpose of helping to guide you to the ones we think are amazing and avoid the ones we don’t think are as good.
Google Trends shows when the world is searching for reviews.
A timely review, available at or before launch, is much more valuable to someone who is considering a day-one purchase – or being tempted by pre-order incentives – than it is to a developer. We know this not only because we can see how IGN’s audience consumes review content, but because Google Trends tells everybody exactly when the entire world is searching for reviews of games.
For example, here is a Google Trends chart of search traffic for “Dishonored review” for the month it came out, October 2012. This is a very typical graph of interest for a game that’s just come out.
The peak is release day, October 9. Just two days later, interest had fallen by nearly half. A week later it was down to a quarter of the peak. Remember, these searches represent the interest level of gamers everywhere in seeking out reviews – in other words, this is when most people wanted to know if Dishonored was any good. Had Bethesda’s new policy been in effect at the time, the vast majority of those people will find only limited, rushed impressions that could skew either excessively negative or positive in circumstances where the game in question starts strong and gets boring or starts weak but gets better over time. So while Bethesda may understand that their players value reviews, the policy ignores when reviews are at their most valuable to gamers.
The price of games is not prohibitive for IGN.
To dispel a popular myth, our opposition to this policy is in no way about getting free games. That is not the issue, because the price of games is not prohibitive for IGN. Also, under this new policy Bethesda is still providing games for free to the press, so nothing has changed for us in terms of expenditure. But even if it had, that wouldn’t be the point. This is about something money can’t buy: access to games before they go on sale. That’s the only way we can give gamers the answers they want, when they want them, from a source that isn’t controlled by the company selling the product they’re curious about.
In the interest of putting cards on the table, it’s also worth noting that IGN profits from traffic on reviews, just as any ad-based publication does. However, reviews do not make up a majority of our traffic, and the site would not wither and die even if we never posted another review. In fact, reviewing smaller games is often a money-losing proposition for us, but it’s something we’re willing to do because we view it as our responsibility to highlight games we find interesting for our community. And while it’s impossible to do a direct one-to-one comparison of the same game reviewed two different ways, our numbers indicate that a review in progress does significantly less traffic than we’d get if we jumped the gun and slapped a score on a game without having played through it completely or having tested the multiplayer servers in a live environment. Again, we do this because we think it’s responsible criticism, even if it takes longer and makes less money. And because individual reviewers do not earn more money based on the traffic of their articles, there is no incentive for them to sensationalize their opinions.
Critics would love to be able to take a month to review each game.
Yes, Bethesda’s post does encourage those who want to read reviews before making their purchase decision to wait until reviews come out – and believe me, I’d like nothing more if that were to happen. Critics everywhere would love to be able to take a month to review each game. But the reality is that no one was waiting for Bethesda’s permission to wait for reviews. That’s not how people work – they’re often impatient, eager to play a game they’ve spent months or years looking forward to based on the potential seen in previews. And the graph of searches for reviews of Bethesda games around launch will not change one bit as a result.
A rushed review will almost never be as thorough as it could have been.
Let’s also consider the effect that withholding review copies will have on the quality of the reviews that will appear with only one day of lead time. Reviewing a major game – especially on the scale of something like Skyrim or Fallout 4 – can take upwards of 60 hours, which is more than a full week’s work. That’s a nerve-wracking experience even when working on an embargo deadline well ahead of launch. Without an embargo, it becomes a race to get a review up while it’s still relevant on Google and YouTube, and powering through a game as quickly as possible is definitely not a good way to experience it or critique it. That’s a problem, because reviews done under those frantic conditions are much more likely to miss things like story details, Easter eggs, and collectables. Reviewers will get frustrated by temporary roadblocks that impede progress and become resentful. They can’t take the time to replay anything to see what would happen if you made a different choice, or if it was as bad as they thought it was. They’re trying to form and express coherent thoughts while sleep-deprived. None of that improves their state of mind while they’re trying to evaluate something that’s supposed to be fun. You can still get a useful idea of a game’s quality from someone who has binged it, but it will almost never be as thorough as it could have been if the reviewer were given more time. This not only affects consumers who are reading those reviews for advice, but also Bethesda, which benefits from having its games thoughtfully and carefully examined.
IGN’s reviewers are not totally immune to the effects of working under rushed conditions, but due to the support of the many other types of content we create around new games as they come out, we’re in a fortunate position where we’re able to resist the rush and hold our final review scores until we feel they’re ready (as we did with No Man’s Sky, Mafia 3, WWE 2K17, and others). Unfortunately, that comes at the cost of being able to offer you the timely, completed reviews you’ve come to expect from us over the past 20 years.
It’s true that even in absence of timely reviews you’ll be always be able to look at streamers on Twitch and YouTube and IGN to watch a game being played to decide if you like it, and that can be a great help. But seeing a few minutes or a few hours of gameplay still isn’t going to give you the full picture, or an analysis from someone who’s put in dozens of hours and has had time to think about why a game works or doesn’t and put those thoughts into words. This was certainly the case for No Man’s Sky, which seemed exciting for the first few hours but quickly became repetitive and dull. The difference between a knee-jerk reaction and an informed review is time.
These policies absolutely do not infringe on anyone’s right to criticize games.
These policies absolutely do not infringe on anyone’s right to criticize games – that criticism will definitely still happen regardless – but it will delay that criticism until it’s less timely. For example, if your state government were to remove the ability to vote by mail or early, you’d still have your right to vote – they’d simply be making it less convenient. In a similar way, withholding review copies hampers the critical process as we’ve known it and offers nothing to fill the void other than pre-release video demonstrations that are tightly controlled by publishers. Without reviews to accompany footage, gamers are less informed and more vulnerable to being stuck with a game they wouldn’t have bought if they’d heard more about it.
Where we go from here is up to Bethesda and other publishers. For IGN’s part, even though our access to certain games may begin later, we will continue to take the time that’s needed to play them to completion (where reasonable) before assigning them final scores, providing you with review-in-progress updates as we go. We’ll also keep producing all our traditional live streams, Let’s Plays, video clips, wiki guides, and more.
I would never ask any gamer not to buy a game they’re excited about to make a statement about a review policy – and I, for one, intend to play Dishonored 2 next month (unless reviews are unexpectedly poor). I can only echo Bethesda’s advice that gamers who care about avoiding disappointing games wait for reviews to come out before buying, and to think about how much you value reviews where the critic has been able to take the time to thoroughly play a game and consider its strengths and weaknesses. And if you don’t, you might be surprised how much you’d miss them if they were to disappear.
Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear gaming rants and lots of random Simpsons references.
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