Eidos and censorship

James Matson | Nov 24, 2008 10:28 AM

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.”

What the hell? Take careful note of the last sentence if nothing else. What that bit of PR fluff boils down to, is that Eidos has at least a fair inkling that some Tomb Raider reviews will be less than favorable – possibly floating below the 70 per cent line – and as such don’t want readers to have access to them before they’ve managed to have a shot at selling you the game anyway. So what then, is the point of a review?

In Eidos-land it would appear that a review is designed to be something you get access to after purchasing a product, so you can exclaim ‘well damn I got me a lemon! Wish I’d known about that before!” and drool a little more into your bib.

It’s a sad state of affairs on two fronts – the first is that online gaming journalism suffers from a bit of an image problem, a problem that stems from the fact you can in theory give any monkey 40KB of web space and a HTML template and they can become some sort of online critic. There are those few online outlets that we trust to review products – games included – in amongst the noise, and to see companies like Eidos attempting to affect the way those outlets conduct the business of providing unbiased and timely reviews further erodes our trust.

The other thing that brings a tear to our eye is that it isn’t the first time Eidos has been involved in something like this. Those with a decent memory might recall the Kane & Lynch ‘Gerstmann’ fiasco from last year, where a reviewer was believed to be fired from a review outlet for an unfavorable write-up of the title. Come on Eidos, don’t do this – don’t deal this way. If you publish games, make them good and if they’re at risk of stinking, then suck it up and wear it, don’t erode the last vestiges of faith in online journalism that remain intact.