Gaming websites may no longer be getting games for early review

[Jamie McKane]

Gaming websites may no longer be getting games for early review

It may no longer be possible to rely on early reviews to help you decide whether to buy a game.

[The_Olof]

So what, they going to hope and pray you decide to play their game. I believe in test before buy

[Ser_Bunnylot]

Not surprised, and I really dont mind this - the traditional video game critic is losing relevance very quickly. I use Steam reviews and youtube videos from the everyday gamer to help make informed decisions. Game reviewers, whos job it is to play games, tend to be bad at gaming and good at writing news and this often makes them give poor scores to niche games that have a serious learning curve. There's plenty of games that only start being good after 10, 20, 30 or more hours and there's no way an overworked journalist is going to invest that much time in something he just has to get through before Thursday night. User reviews though, tend to be from people who make up the target audience and their opinions carry far more weight for me.

Wouldn't mind at all if we dropped "professional game reviews" completely. Too bad publishers are doing this for the wrong reasons. At least I hope that pre-order culture slows down a bit, like all these sites are pushing.