Note: this post contains rumors which are unsourced, because they’re rumors. While I wouldn’t post about them unless i was fairly certain they had some credence, they should not be taken as fact, and should be approached with the appropriate amount of skepticism. The exception to this is the fact that the three studios in question did blackball EGM/1UP (as well as a number of other publishers in Europe as well), and Sony did fuck up last year and try to bully Kotaku into pulling a story.
A stir was caused this week when EGM’s Dan Hsu revealed in the magazine’s editorial section that they had been essentially blacklisted by three companies for what those publishers viewed to be low review scores. While I don’t know that anyone is too broken up about Midway’s Mortal Kombat studio or Sony’s sports studio picking up their toys and going home, everyone seems surprised that Ubisoft has pulled all marketing and has now refused to send any preview builds or early review copies of their games to EGM or Ziff-Davis publications. Ubisoft may not be quite the powerhouse they were a few years ago (releasing a lot of bad games for Wii and emulating the worst sequel tendencies of Electronic Arts circa 2002-2006 will do that), but they’re still a large publisher that puts out a lot of popular games.
So why? Well, Hsu is of the opinion that a 4.5 for Assassin’s Creed in the last issue (which was one score out of 4 that Ziff Davis has assigned to the game, including the three in the magazine and one on 1UP) was the “final straw”, and well, I’m inclined to believe that that’s true. However, the Ubisoft shenanigans don’t surprise me. While it’s not well known in the general gaming populace, rumors have swirled for a long time over the crazy, nepotistical and egotistical crap that happens at the highest levels of Ubisoft. Yves Guillemot is rumored to be an egomaniac, who routinely craps on his underlings while promoting family within the company to positions that were already filled, creating entire studios for family members to have new positions within the company, and generally running the company like a child.
The real problem here is really for the studios involved. Assassin’s Creed is a controversially love it or hate it game, and despite a lot of very conflicting reviews, it still sold phenomenally well. Why? Because magazines and online sources covered it relentlessly. Reviews on a game can only hurt it so much when such a massive amount of hype and anticipation is built within the media for a title, and save for possibly Game Informer, EGM is the most widely circulated gaming magazine around, and their credibility has only gotten stronger over the past 18 months.
Blacklisting sources for reviews that aren’t in line with your projections is an act of pissy ego that isn’t going to help you. Maybe in the past, that could gain leverage with media outlets, but in this case, EGM has called Ubisoft et al’s bluff and exposed them, a move which is oddly reminiscent of Sony’s own PR catastrophe last year. It didn’t work then, and it isn’t going to work now. I would venture a guess that this will be conveniently forgotten once Haze has come out and gotten bad reviews, and Ubisoft needs publicity for Endwar. At least, it will if their smart.
-Aegies
This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 12:03 am and is filed under Midway, Ubisoft, EGM, 1UP, Sony. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.