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Lara Croft in Reviews Controversy Shocker!

Hermiod

Hermiod

Admiral
Admiral
Tomb Raider: Underworld publisher Eidos hires PR firm to "manage" reviews.

Gamespot UK journalist Guy Cocker posted on his Twitter feed that PR firm, Barrington Harvey, called a number of UK-based games journalists to inform them that any reviews of Tomb Raider: Underworld that gave the game a score of less than 8/10 (or equivalent) were under the kind of embargo that's all too common these days.

Eurogamer and the Official Xbox Magazine have already given it a 6. Eurogamer's review apparently caused "problems".

Barrington Harvey have since issued a statement on the matter, where they basically deny everything right up to the final paragraph where they then admit it.

It's not currently working however, as the games' metacritic score is 78% at time of writing.
 
Oh, Eidos. When will you learn to stop screwing with the review process?

...and make games that don't suck :lol:
 
I just wish this happened before the Giant Bombcast this week. I wonder if they'll even touch this bit of news with a 10 foot pole... although, I'm sure they're not getting a lot of games from Eidos right now anyway. :p
 
The real reason for this is that the gaming "media" industry are very amateurish, many of them are just internet-nerd-fans. This sort of review/advertising/buying stuff happens all the time, and gamers online are incredibly easy to influence.

It's real simple, if every major gaming site out there said, 'f the embargo' and released their 6/10 scores, what could Eidos do? the alternative would be NO MAJOR SITES reviewing their games. But enough of the "major" sites would cave in.
 
Eidos could tell those sites that they won't be invited to press events, they won't get the kind of face time with the developers that they want and they won't get review copies.

There are so many gaming sites and magazines out there reporting the same news and reviewing the same games that exclusives are everything.

I'd say Eurogamer, who broke the embargo and published their 7/10 review, were above the review buying problem but then I saw their Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 review last year.
 
That sucks, the last Tomb Raider game (Legend?) was quite good, best in many, many years. Got decent reviews too, an 82 on metacritic.
 
Stone_Cold_Sisko said:
The real reason for this is that the gaming "media" industry are very amateurish, many of them are just internet-nerd-fans. This sort of review/advertising/buying stuff happens all the time, and gamers online are incredibly easy to influence.
Click to expand...

This is absolutely true. Embargoes are very common in the PR world, but traditionally they are simply a promise not to report information (or publish a review) before a specific time and date. They are also voluntary agreements between the news organization and the source.

Any mainstream journalism who was given those kinds of conditions on an embargo would laugh in the PR guy's face and tell him to shove his embargo up his ass.

But the "new online media" is very easily influenced by corporate PR and handlers (not to mention the fact that many of them are actively paid off with free travel, products, goodies, etc., which traditional reporters are required to reject).

Things like this make the slow decline of traditional news media so disturbing, because they're being replaced by untrained, unprofessional (and often unethical) hacks who are so easily manipulated by the corporations and their legions of PR spinmeisters.
 
Hermiod said:
Eidos could tell those sites that they won't be invited to press events, they won't get the kind of face time with the developers that they want and they won't get review copies.
Click to expand...

And those sites won't have any readers either if they're deemed to simply be regurgitating corporate press releases rather than publishing legitimate reviews, including giving low scores to games the reviewers think suck.
 
You think readers care?
If editorial integrity mattered, 1up/EGM would have millions of subscribers for standing up to Ubisoft's press band.

IGN and GameSpot are just fine, especially since they're owned by Fox and CBS respectively. People will go to them because they don't really care about things like exclusive previews/reviews and the whole Gerstmann fiasco.
 
I tried the demo for Tomb Raider Underworld and quite liked it. I'll probably pick up the game.
 
The ratings are on par with the recent TR: Anniversary, a cool remake of the original that usually got something in the range of 75 to 85. There's nothing wrong with a score in the high 70s. It just means that the game isn't a revolutionary phenomenon, or that it doesn't deviate too far from a working formula.
 
Yeah, I liked Anniversary, and I liked the Underworld demo.

I've heard the game is seriously, criminally short though, which sucks if true.

I'll probably pick it up at some point, though.

...But Eidos meddling with the Metacritic score? lame.
 
I downloaded the Underworld demo a few days ago, but have still not gotten around to playing it (Fallout 3 is an evil free-time sucking monster!) Still, I wasn't a Tomb Raider fan (never got on with any of the original games) until very recently when I downloaded the TR:Anniversary demo on steam and was surprised by how good it was. Thanks mostly to that I've since bought TRA, Legend and an Xbox360 controller for windows.

So if the new game is anywhere near as good as the last two, I don't know what Eidos are fussing over. Surely being seen to attempt to fix the reviews can only reflect poorly on them. I mean even an amature journalist can see such an overt attempt is a report worthy story in and of itself.
 
The title had me thinking of a different Laura Croft and I was curious as to what type controversy she had gotten involved.

Miss July 2008 is what I was thinking
LauraCroft-July08.jpg


Perhaps something in the thread title to differentiate it as related to Underworld or the game would've helped me.
 
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