[QUOTE="Ish_basic"]
[QUOTE="Metamania"]
I agree. If it happened on Gamespot (second time in their career, I might as well add) or IGN or someplace bigger than Examiner.com, then it would most certainly be a MAJOR deal for a lot of people to come to grips with. Seeing that it came from Examiner.com is considered minor news at best, I suppose.
Metamania
It wouldn't be suprising, though. Developers and publishers are your source for pretty much all your content as a gaming journalist. Good luck getting press passes, interviews, review copies, etc after you burn them. Small sites are especially susceptible to this kind of pressure, but even larger sites like this one would struggle if they played too much hardball with industry insiders.
Yeah, that's a good point. Once you're a gaming journalist, you have a lot of connections with both developer and publishers. Do something wrong, however, and your bridges are pretty much burned with them. So it's definitely a struggle that everyone in the gaming journalism business has to put up with if they wish to keep on going with their jobs.
Yeah unless this system changes, then journalists will always be under the thumb of developers and publishers. Someone else wrote they need each other equally, but that's only true if 100% of the journalists have integrity. I'd say it's probably at 10% so if you stand up for what you actually believe in and write your true opinion, they have no hesitation of cutting you off because there's many other journalists out there willing to just say good things to get free stuff they can turn to. So while journalists SHOULD have an equal amount of power, they do not exercise this power as a whole and many are simply mouthpieces for publishers and developers. The only way this would change is it review copies are abolished. It should be up to the publication to buy and provide review copies of games to its writers. Then the writer has no obligation to maintain contacts with game industry PR and will feel free to write what they really think.
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