The Verge/Polygon: Funded by Microsoft (Videogame Journalism in a nutshell)

[Dcubed]

Way to kill off any shred of credibility before your site even officially launched

 

(For those who haven't followed the story - basically this "independent" VG site recently released a wanky documentary about the founding of the site, never mind the fact that it hasn't even fully launched yet... Turns out that the documentary was bankrolled by Microsoft!)

 

https://twitter.com/expdotzine

 

 

(Arthur Gies is the Reviews editor of Polygon)

 

The sad part is that I'm not even surprised or phased by this sort of thing anymore. Pretty much every major gaming site is nothing more than a puppet for the big publishers and MS/Sony's PR departments

Edited September 24, 2012 by Dcubed

[Cube]

We were once offered $20,000 by Sony to give the 3DS a poor review. We said no.

 

That was a lie.

[Lens of Truth]

My god, really?!! All this time I'd given journos the benefit of the doubt - in other words that they're "merely" partial. The "3DS/Nintendo is DOOMED" vs the "Hope for Vita" phenomenon has underlined this imbalance to an embarrassing degree. In my naivety I assumed they were just taking little scraps of very temporal information and running with wishful thinking or 'conventional wisdom'. Indeed I'm sure that is how most of them tick, bless em.

 

More than a little perturbing.

[Aimless]

They funded it in order to pimp Internet Explorer, which is handled by a different division to the Xbox.

 

You see a greater conflict of interest every day, as videogame websites survive on the advertising money of publishers.

[Dcubed]

They funded it in order to pimp Internet Explorer, which is handled by a different division to the Xbox.

 

Regardless, it's a large amount of money from the very company that they're supposedly completely impartial to (not to mention that IE9 is actually on 360 now anyway...)

 

It's all the same company and the same money. Microsoft is not Sony, their divisions actually work together

 

You see a greater conflict of interest every day, as videogame websites survive on the advertising money of publishers.

 

Precisely my point. It's standard fare amongst the big sites. This is just yet another example of it happening (albeit one of the clearest examples I can think of) and at this point I don't trust anyone (haven't read a review on one of these major sites for years)

 

Has anyone seen any examples of Nintendo doing these sorts of dodgy dealings? Given the contempt for them that is held throughout the media at large, I don't really see anything to suggest this to be the case (aside from the strangely universally positive reviews for SMG2 and Skyward Sword - which I'm sure they had to pay for, regardless if the games deserved those scores or not)

 

I do know that they sometimes hand out some cool swag with the review copies of their games, but nothing of any real monetary value or anything suspiciously influential. Certainly nothing like the $800 swag bags that were given away for Halo 3 reviewers who would treat the game favourably, or those free TVs given out by Sony, or EA's blacklisting of reviewers who looked down upon Battlefield 3... http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/3354/article/ea-caught-attempting-to-manipulate-battlefield-3-scores-in-norwegian-press/

Edited September 24, 2012 by Dcubed

[Daft]

It's all the same company and the same money. Microsoft is not Sony, their divisions actually work together

 

You've obviously never worked with Microsoft. Sony's divisions might not communicate with each other but Microsoft is absolutely rife with infighting - even within divisions.

[Dcubed]

 

You've obviously never worked with Microsoft. Sony's divisions might not communicate with each other but Microsoft is absolutely rife with infighting - even within divisions.

 

No I know that, but my point is that Microsoft employ the same overarching strategy across all its divisions and that they all work together towards a somewhat shared goal (albeit oftentimes against each other)

 

If Polygon here were being paid off by Sony Pictures or Sony Music, there would be no real issue, since they are effectively a completely different company to Sony Computer Entertainment. However, Microsoft is just Microsoft. It doesn't matter what product was being sponsored here, there is a clear conflict of interest at play here and their credibility (of what little there is in this sector of journalism ) is shattered completely by this scandal.

[Daft]

Sony and Microsoft work in equally ineffective and detached ways, they just do it differently.

[flameboy]

Way to kill off any shred of credibility before your site even officially launched

 

(For those who haven't followed the story - basically this "independent" VG site recently released a wanky documentary about the founding of the site, never mind the fact that it hasn't even fully launched yet... Turns out that the documentary was bankrolled by Microsoft!)

 

https://twitter.com/expdotzine

 

 

(Arthur Gies is the Reviews editor of Polygon)

 

The sad part is that I'm not even surprised or phased by this sort of thing anymore. Pretty much every major gaming site is nothing more than a puppet for the big publishers and MS/Sony's PR departments

 

Well that sucks I've been enjoying The Verge's Polygon output and looking forward to the site launching properly. They've acquired quite the ensemble of great writers from other sites. Also Besties is one of the best videogame podcasts out there. This for me is a massive smack in the face for Arthur Gies. He is on Rebel FM and is often very arrogant and dismissive of what other reviewers do and why they feel the need to highlight certains things in games, even calling into question the language people use to describe games. Now it would seem his reviewers can write whatever they like because people will constantly ask the question as to whether it was paid for.