Hsu Strikes Again!
Dan "Shoe" Hsu, of EGM fame, is no stranger to stirring up the pot and pissing people off by sticking to his guns and being as honest as possible. A couple of years ago, he managed to create a rather hefty divide amongst gaming journalists with an editorial he wrote explaining that not all of us are as objective as we would like to claim we are.
Now, you would think members of the gaming industry would know better than to jerk either Hsu or EGM around. You would also think that, especially after all the hullabaloo surrounding recent events involving a certain GameSpot editor, but apparently some people just don't know when it's a good time to be on their best behavior. In his most recent EGM column, Hsu not only talks about how certain publishers have banned EGM from covering their titles because of some recent unfavorable reviews from the magazine, but he actually goes so far as to identify who's been trying to intimidate his publication:
According to Hsu, Midway’s Mortal Kombat development team, Sony’s sports game division, and Ubisoft have all allegedly banned EGM from further coverage of their products. The reason: Apparently, they didn’t take too kindly to EGM’s review coverage of their games.
Of course, this type of behavior from publishers probably isn't surprising to most of us these days. But that doesn't excuse it, not by any means. Kudos to Hsu for taking a stand and being unafraid to call these bullies out by name.
Publishers Get a Taste of "Shoe" [Video Game Media Watch]
[via Kotaku]
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to Miscellany on 8 January 2008
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: bullies, dan hsu, egm, integrity, journalism, midway, sony, ubisoft
Yeah, gaming publications really need to get their collective acts together as the gaming market gets older and more sophisticated.
That said, the coverage of this editorial hasn't made a lot of sense to me... I'm totally not someone who knows anything about this kind of thing, but aren't things like reporting and reviews covered by, like fair use laws? I don't see how they can "ban" them from saying what they want.
It looks like the original editorial which you linked says they were threatening to pull advertising and "support for normal editorial coverage of their titles", whatever that means. I'd presume that's something like getting copies of the game before they hit stores so they can get their reviews out in a timely way?
Jeff, wishy-washy publication ethics are only one piece of the problem. There are still developers with egos that think their games are golden sunshine (like the MK Team), publishers that ship garbage (like Sony sports), and marketing teams that get fussy when someone calls their game mediocre (like Ubisoft).
It's only when all of these elements combine, not unlike Voltron, that we get a clusterf*ck of incredible proportions. The game industry as a whole is growing through intense growing pains and this is just another example of it.
I'd say that I was now going to boycott these developers but... uh... let's just say there's a reason their games have been getting shit-tastic reviews.
I'm just glad people are finally starting to call them on it, there's no reason any developer out there should think that they can strongarm journalists and NOT have it brought to light.
This is why I love EGM. They refuse to bow to pressure from anyone. Unlike some other publications...>.>