[Intrepid Homoludens]

Batman Returns, Tomb Raider: The Angel Of Darkness, Shadow Of The Colossus, and Katamari Damacy.

AWESOME! My favourite games journalist, James Wagner Au, has just posted this up:

After covering the game industry for some five years, I think I’ve found the primary source of the trouble. Not the only source, but the weakest link in the greater chain of suck—and more key, the one that can be hammered at by blogs like Kotaku.

I found it at an E3 cocktail party in Beverly Hills, shortly after I’d begun introducing myself not as a journalist but as a writer with the virtual world Second Life—not a game per se, but close enough, evidently, for folks on the business end of the industry to lower their shields. The topic was the gaming press, and on that subject, the opinion of a top exec from a major publisher was decidedly bottom line.

“Press previews are very important to our sales,” he casually mentioned to me over martinis, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Retailers don’t know anything about games. So we show them previews of our titles from the game press, and they reserve shelf space for our games on the strength of those.”

And just like that, the gaping mouth of suckage was staring me in the face. Or rather, it had always been there, but I just hadn’t noticed until then.

For the thing of it is, game magazine previews are almost uniformly positive, even for the most undistinguished titles. So it unrolls thus: publisher makes mediocre game; press previews depict mediocre game as being good or at least worth a look; excited gamers read previews, foolishly believe them, start making pre-sale orders of mediocre game; driven by preview press and pre-sale numbers based on that press, retailers stock up on mediocre game; publisher makes money from mediocre game, keeps making more games like it.

And the circle jerk is complete. All started by the gaming press, in their preview section.

Kotaku feature, 3/11/06