The joys of publishers trying to influence game publications' scores.

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You Don't Understand Our Genius

Last week, word got out that Sony and Factor 5 were sending out pamphlets to the larger video game magazines and websites, with detailed instruction on how to play Lair "properly". Of course, when news of this got out, there was much mockery of the two companies for seriously thinking something like this would work.

One really needs to wonder what was going through Sony and Factor 5's minds to release such a thing. Did they actually think that publications would be lining up to retract their old reviews, and replace them with 9s out of 10, all the while praising the genius that is Lair, and berating themselves for not seeing Factor 5's brilliance sooner? Looking at any magazine or website that does reviews, I can only think of a handful of times that they have changed their score in the last ten years, and the reasons for doing so were rather complicated. Never has a publication changed their score because a publisher was in a huff that their game didn't score well.

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Now they're expected to change this practice just because a couple of companies sent out a pamphlet that essentially screams, "You don't understand our genius!" That's just silly. Moreover, I have to wonder if for the same amount of money as it cost to produce and ship out these pamphlets Factor 5 could have hired someone to quickly patch Lair's controls,

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and make the game more playable. Or would this have been too much of an admission that the company had made a mistake, thus breaking that precious image of infallibility?

No one has changed their score yet, but I suspect that this has to do with how wide spread the poor scores for Lair are. The game publications have a united front in this case. If scores were more diverse we may never have heard of any spats between Factor 5 and magazines. There are plenty of cases in the past of publishers threatening to withdraw advertising dollars when their games score poorly. How many magazines have succumbed to this is anyone's guess, but in the case of Lair the companies responsible for the title can't really play that card lest they want to abandon a huge portion of future advertising campaigns, consequently making it very difficult to sell that future title due to lack of people who know it exists.

If nothing else, this incident does remind us that we need to be vigilante, as game companies are constantly trying to push for high scores in reviews regardless of whether or not they deserve them. In this case, we saw a pretty sad example of it. It's a problem that won't be going away anytime soon, but hopefully this will give companies pause, and realize that if they aren't careful they could be laughed off the playground for trying such a stunt.

Jeff Nash

September 11, 2007


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