Eidos and censorship

James Matson knows the truth is out there, it’s just going to be a little late.

A lot of people place stock in game reviews. Whether we end up basing a purchasing decision on the words or rating attached to a game by a particular review source is largely immaterial, many of us will still factor it in. The game review – good or bad – becomes a part of the process. So, you can imagine that we’d all like to get our hands on those reviews in a timely manner and with an opinion that’s solely the thoughts of the person reviewing it, free from bias and Orwellian mind control.

It would seem however, that Eidos Interactive (the publisher behind of Age of Conan, Hitman and Tomb Raider) has a different concept of game reviews and how they should be crafted. In what can plainly be seen (at Eidos’ own admission) as an attempt to prevent unfavorable reviews of Tomb Raider: Underworld making it online before it has had a chance to sell a bunch of copies, the company has given a PR firm the job of convincing review sites to hold off publishing reviews if the scores are below a certain threshold.

The whole debacle originally came to light thanks to a UK journalist posting on Twitter to say he received a call from Eidos asking him to hold off publishing a review of Tomb Raider if the score would be below 8.0 until the title had been on sale for three days.

Apparently this same request was made to a number of gaming portals with the hopes of positively affecting the overall ‘meta score’ for the game provided by the Metacritic website, which itself is just an average of many online review scores for a game. While you’d honestly expect the PR firm to deny an accusation like this or at least coat it in glazed honey and unicorns, when approached for comment the company unashamedly confirmed the rumor in a chat with gaming site Videogamer247.

“That’s right. We’re trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos,” a representative of the firm advised. “We’re trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that’s handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out really, just to ensure that we don’t put people off buying the game, basically.”