Originally posted by: Icepick
How reputable is PC Gamer for their reviews? I don't frequent that site so am not sure how much stock to put into this rating. Are they one of those sites that do a lot of advertising for video games and, thus, have something to gain or lose from the rating that they give?
PC Gamer is run by Future Publications. Thanks to free subs, I've been receiving their rag for probably 4-5 years. A lot of people like them, but PC Gamer hides some dirty little secrets...
PC Gamer reviews A LOT of games exclusively, just lately they've had the exclusive scoops on Hellgate, Orange Box, Crysis, and some others. Funny thing is, they've had the reviews in the magazines and on shelves before the games have even gone gold. In fact, one of the screenshots from their Orange box review specifically shows bug reporting text that you would normally only see in the beta version of a game.
From what I understand, some magazine companies will trade off getting an exclusive review of a game for giving that game a score in a certain range, like if Publisher XXX went to magazine XXX and said, "We'll let you get the exclusive review on game XXX, but you will have to give it at least a 90%." Does PC Gamer do this? I dunno, but it seems suspicious at best that they are printing reviews of beta software in their magazine to the point where they pull actual opinions and screenshots from unfinished code.
It's worrisome to say the least, and has made me less than trusting of the PC Gamer scores over the last couple of years, as well as other Future Publications such as Maximum PC. It's pretty sad actually, because these used to be the 2 publications I swore by, but I guess you grow up and start to notice things.