Why Game Publishers Don't Like Gaming Press

If anything good came out of Gerstmanngate, it's this pair of commentaries on videogame publishers and how they have the wrong attitude towards enthusiast press outlets like GameSpot, not to mention the wrong attitude towards videogames. Says Newsweek's N'Gai Croal:

Publishers generally hold the enthusiast press in utter contempt, and they have for a long time. This disdain began as scorn for the enthusiast media's roots in videogame fandom, rather than traditional journalism from "respectable" publications, but it has since metastasized into a veiled but nonetheless seething anger over the advent of the Internet and with it the rise of fan sites, forums and blogs over which publishers can exert little pressure, let alone control.

Followed up ably by a brief essay from game developer and industry watcher Peter B.:

As a developer, I think publishers actually have contempt for the actual product they sell. They fundamentally don't know what makes games good and show no willingness to listen to the opinions of developers [...] However, unfortunately, to some extent their contempt for the reviewers is justified, in the sense that games that get bad reviews often sell well. This is just an extension of their contempt for the product, or at least the product's consumer - they'll buy anything, so why make it good?

Some days I feel like the entire game industry exists to stifle innovation. We have all of these hand-wringing conversations about whether game reviews should be consumer guides or critiques of the form or both or neither, and don't stop to consider that it's never going to happen as long as game reviews are simply churned out as part of the great machine.

Written by, as Christian Nutt says in the same thread, "gamers with no insight who can't write and who are managed by people who have not clue what goes into compelling editorial because it is not demanded of them."