Meanwhile In Games Journalism…

Last month I wrote something, Five Ways To Get Ahead In Movie Journalism.  It took a (admittedly sardonic) look at the relationship between concessions and prominence in movie journalism.  Now, to take a brief departure from our usual coverage, we take an eyeball at some ongoing controversy within games journalism.

Kotaku is one of the biggest sites out there. Recently, they’ve revealed that they have had trouble with major gaming studios refusing to respond or provide them with review material.

In recent weeks, readers have asked questions. They’ve wondered why I, someone who has enthusiastically covered Assassin’s Creed games for years, didn’t review the most recent one. They’ve wondered why we didn’t seem to be subject to Fallout 4 embargoes of embargoes and why we didn’t have a review of that game on the day it came out.

This was an apparent ‘retaliation’ for telling it like it is and not polishing turds, like other major sites and other smaller sites trying to climb some sort of ladder.

For the better part of two years, two of the biggest video game publishers in the world have done their damnedest to make it as difficult as possible for Kotaku to cover their games. They have done so in apparent retaliation for the fact that we did our jobs as reporters and as critics. We told the truth about their games, sometimes in ways that disrupted a marketing plan, other times in ways that shone an unflattering light on their products and company practices. Both publishers’ actions demonstrate contempt for us and, by extension, the whole of the gaming press. They would hamper independent reporting in pursuit of a status quo in which video game journalists are little more than malleable, servile arms of a corporate sales apparatus. It is a state of affairs that we reject.

Kotaku readers always deserve the truth. You deserve our best work. It doesn’t matter which company is mad at us today, or which companies get mad at us in the future. You’ll continue to get it.

The full article can be read here.  And as they have pointed out it isn’t the first time they have came into ‘cross hairs’, with a previous blacklist coming from Sony.