Matters seem to have gone from bad to worse in the Aventurine vs. Eurogamer affair, which I mentioned the other day in More Dirt Flies. In a lengthy post on the boards, Aventurine gives details and explains why they aren’t in favor of a “re-review” of Darkfall.
In a nutshell, since Eurogamer won’t pull the review, Aventurine believes the damage has already been done. The 2/10 rating has been picked up by Metacritic, and any new score won’t make a difference, since the re-review will take time. Thus:
We don’t need a re-review, we need a real review. We know for a fact that the original review is a fraud and yet Eurogamer stands by it. They should keep standing by it then or take it down based on the evidence.
Regarding that evidence, Aventurine as before is basing their stand on a combination of server logs and the flaws/mistakes in the review. They provided Eurogamer with two accounts, and going by the logs, neither Ed Zitron nor the MMO editor for Eurogamer spent much time in the game:
The reviewer’s supervisor and MMO Editor for Eurogamer spent 2 minutes in the character creator but didn’t create a character. Ed Zitron spent 2 hours 33 minutes logged in the game and the character creator. In this time the reviewer tried 9 different characters. Much of the time was spent creating and deleting these characters. 14 minutes before the reviewer stopped playing Darkfall altogether he said in global chat: “how do I cast spells…..help”.
There is much more, and you may want to haul out the old asbestos monitor to read the piece. Aventurine is not happy, and I don’t blame them for feeling that way.
Scorpia, how much does the reputation of the developer or publisher affect the ratings of a game? Would something like this have ever happened to Microsoft or Epic? I don’t know much about Adventurine’s clout but I wonder how much the fear of lost revenue is a factor in what can and cannot be said in a review.
Good question, wavinator. Next question? ;)
Seriously, it’s really difficult to make a pronouncement. However, I consider it unlikely that any game from a “big name” publisher would receive so low a score.
Aventurine is a small company, and has no “clout” to speak of. They don’t have a lot of marketing, either. So low scores at Metacritic is bound to hurt. And, of course, the review at Eurogamer was no help at all.
On the other hand, we have the example of Stardock’s Demigod. Some sites jumped in right away and gave it bad press, mainly for the tech problems.
However, Stardock’s rep, and their fast response to problems has seen their MC score rise to 8.1 from users, and 7.8 from “professionals”.
And this just in: since I was there to check on DG, I looked up Darkfall. They show one “professional” (ahem) review (from Eurogamer) with a 20 (of 100). On the other hand, the user vote is 7.5. So maybe Aventurine will weather this one, if more vitriol doesn’t start flying.
What Scorpia failed to mention is that the score of 7.5 from players is based on 216 votes! So which score do you feel is more correct: a score of 20 from ONE review OR a score of 75 (on a 100 point scale) based on 216 votes fron players?
Now, that’s a truff one. What do you think , Scropia the All-Knowing?
You can really tell when it’s a full moon. As well as who hasn’t heard of the Appeal to Popularity fallacy or selection bias. Or who elects to pretend that he hasn’t.
Side note: Hey, google ads, good job with the ANTM youtube clip below. I’m sure it’s properly licensed and has wide appeal to this site’s audience.
In general, I agree that big name publishers do better in reviews, in part because of their fanboys.
NWN2’s Storm of Zehir is a case in point. The Bioware forums are filled with people glossing over the obvious game bugs (I presume because they are hoping the developers will devote their time on the game editor.)
Someone like M$, however, has to be verrrry careful, since most everyone enjoys jumping on their case.