To be fair, jamotide's seemingly cynical assumption is reasonable. As long as authors may benefit from positively slanted reviews, we should have an expectation of bias, conscious and egregious or not. If an organization has a considered set of guidelines regarding bias à la Consumer Reports (http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/about-us/no-commercial-use-policy/index.htm), that may be the basis for trusting them more fully.

A default assumption of zero bias in the face of clear seller influences is wishful thinking.

All that said, I expect that many reviewers are essentially honest and have excellent intentions.


edit: "Bought" may be an unfair name for what I describe, as it suggests an explicit trade for benefit.

You may heard of this little thing called "money".

:)

First you must understand the situation for every site.
They are in constant struggle to get the most hits.
How do they get them? By posting interesting previews/reviews as fast as possible.
Now how do they get a little edge. Simple by establishing good relationships with publishers.
Than they will get a pre-release copy of a game. Most times those games are far from the thing that finally hits the stores.
How can they review such things you may ask, well here comes the rivalry between sites. They trust the developers/publishers
that certain bugs are eliminated and the gameplay is more smoothly in the final version.
Thats not all. The publisher may demand that they can't publish a review if the game doesn't get a high enough score.
They can't do that? Ooopps, maybe the next time that site must buy the game like normal people because they don't get a free copy. Maybe there is no longer a nice advertisement on that site. They don't get those nice backstage passes for the next show.

Gee, as long as there was something like a free press (normal or digital) there were those trying to influence whats printed.
Thats the reason i try to read every possible review before i think about buying a game.

It's one thing to be sceptical and questioning certain reviews / sites / companies. But practically claiming "guilty until proven innocent" is even worse then being too naive and believing all.

Why not be skeptical about them all?

Schnuff's appraisal of the situation rings pretty true to me. It seems quite likely that popular and successful reviewers play ball, so to speak. Consumer Reports attempts to systematically eliminate the influence of the seller. I'd be happy to hear of gaming journalists that do the same. This means no free review copies, no early review copies, no game-related advertising, and no referrals from the producers and sellers back to these reviews. Adopting these limitations would put a reviewer at a competitive disadvantage.

Accepting that bias is a result of influence is reasonable. This isn't some philosophical rejection of purity in the world. It's acknowledgement that the present system favors those willing to get along.

There is still useful information to be found in reviews.

If you really resent video game reviews that much then do what I and many people did: Do your own research. You're not forced to obey the reviews. There's always people opinions (that's ironically can be considered reviews too) or you can always play the demo or rent it from your friends or rental places before deciding on the purchase.

Also it's not just video games. Movies and tech reviews are pretty biased too sometimes. If you go to Gizmondo you will see them praising the new iPhone like it's the second coming. Or go to any tech sites and see how they keep declaring that handheld console is dead and tablet is all the rage.

Respectfully, your response doesn't suit any of my points.

I'm not resentful, nor have I said so.
I've said that that despite the seller influences, reviews still contain useful information.
And that 'forced to obey' comment is totally out of left field.

I was simply supporting jamotide's reasonable comment, which essentially says:
"Consider influence, unless you have evidence to believe it has been minimized."

Please don't take this as a negative response. It isn't.

First: I'm not against being skeptical - I'm all for it. But you should be sure you actually have a witch before you burn it, not the other way around.

Second: don't you forget something in your example? Yes, bias is around and will always be. In the end none of us can claim to be completely unbiased in all situations. However, if someone's all for playing ball, his customers WILL notice that, with the result of lesser customers / buyers.
In short: no credibility, no clientele. No clientele, no business.

I understand why a person who have bought several games that everybody said where good but turned out to be buggy disasters would stop buying games and download them illegally instead.
That is the easiest way of knowing if a game is good or not, actually playing it.
The big companys have brought the pirates upon themselves for getting to greedy.

But what if it's not just to his/her taste? I mean you can't expect people to have an uniform opinion toward something.

Let say you like A game. You told your friend how fun the game was and your friend decided to buy it. Turn out he hate the game and prefer B game instead even when you dislike B game gameplay.

Like I said before, you don't need to obey the reviews. You're the one to blame if you trust the reviews too much.

As I read it, Jamotide's comment is textbook skepticism. The only poster I can see discussing burning metaphorical witches is you. I'm probably reading 'bought' too generously.

Your second point is logical enough. Gamespot is still a going concern, though, despite evidence that they've bent to seller pressure in the past. Certainly, I agree with you that customer savvy partially offsets industry influence. Given that viewpoint, though, why bash the skeptics? They're a significant part of the correcting mechanism.

I guess we're going in circles. No offense to you intended in anything I've said.

It's not just sites, it's magazines too.

My favorite gaming magazine (Gameplay, formerly know as PC Gameplay) and the only Dutch gaming magazine I read, has posted apologies several apologies over time for not being able to review games in time. It's always due to no review copy or 1 that's been received too late. Several other Dutch magazines didn't have that issue for those games.
Over the years they stated a few times that they have been aproached to write exclusive (p)reviews in return for positive criticism.
They say they always turned down those offers and I believe them. In the past I have seen them review games and giving 20-30 points lower on a 100 point scale. Although that's exceptional. Normally it's around 15 points lower on those "exclusives". Often the difference between great and good or good and descent.
To not damage their relationship with publishers, they have never named and shamed publishers who approached them. On the other side, from games they get review copies too late or not at all, it's clear to see who the publishers are.
Gameplay has given 1 major reason publishers do this: 1st week sales. In the 1st week the majority of the revenue is made, so publishers go to great length to protect and increase those sales. Not to mention that bad 1st week sales often are bad publicity for a game, even if it received great ratings.

Again, I'm fully for being skeptical.

However when a skeptical opinion gets depicted as facts and all thrown into the same bucket (see his second post), that's as biased as it gets. And we're at what point? Using bias to fend off assumed bias?
There's a difference between suspected and convicted and history taught us a few lessons about why this should be so.
Otherwise with that mindset we may as well sell new cars with 10 speeding tickets, because we can assume that sooner or later they're all offenders, caught or not.