IGN Whores Out their Website for Exclusives
By now we all should know that the gaming press is shady as all hell, but today we get some details as to just how questionable their practices are. Variety writer Ben Fritz called out IGN on their exclusive review of GTA4 and after a response by IGN is firing back. The most notable detail revealed is that IGN has people responsible for getting the attention of publishers in order to "secure" their exclusives, and that is done by kissing ass and giving a game lots of postive coverage so that publishers take notice. In other words they whore themselves out.
My position as editor-in-chief in the Xbox channel is to actually try to get [exclusive reviews]. It's not like somebody kinda calls you up and says, "Hey, we have the exclusive on this." It's my job to actually secure that. And that's just constantly being in contact with PR...
If you looked at our site, that entire week was all GTA tops on IGN.com, which was something we'd never done before. So it was an entire week leading to the review. That's how we get exclusives of any kind. We have real estate which is the placement of a story and that's what we negotiate with. Whether it's news or features or reviews, our bargaining chip is to basically say, "I will put it here if you let me have this." So we basically gave them top on IGN.com for five days, which is a huge deal, and that, to my understanding, is what sold it... - Hilary Goldstein, IGN
If they are willing to go to such lengths to score an exclusive why should we trust any reviews they give us? After all they gave GTA4 10s all across the board in spite of the freezing issues and the myriad of gameplay issues being reported by gamers across the net. Even IGN's Matt Casamassina and Mark Bozon don't agree with the gushing review.
The gaming press and their reviews shouldn't be trusted and this is just another in the long list of reasons why.
Thats really low, ive lost a lot of respect for ign. Thanks for the news!
