An Exclusive Problem

Ignited by IGN’s exclusive perfect 10 review of GTA4 (which has also been given a 10 and a 9.8 by IGN’s regional sister sites now as well), Variety has suggested (h/t Kotaku) that “Exclusive Reviews” are ethically suspect. While I doubt that there’s a literal “quid pro quo” for these reviews, when a publisher grants an “exclusive” to a reviewer, they are essentially giving them money (in the form of page views, or sales in the case of print magazines). Does the reviewer have, at least at the subconscious level, a desire to rate the game higher than they normally would in this case?

This basically feeds into the same issues that were brought up, most visibly, by Ubisoft and Eidos recently, where the publishers have threatened (or actually followed through on their threats in the case of Ubisoft) to pull their advertising if the reviewer gives a bad score to their game. Since an early exclusive drives page views and sales, losing these exclusives would actually hurt the bottom line of the publication. It’s easy to imagine what kind of response a media outlet would receive if they actually poorly scored an exclusive review. Would it be safe to say that that particular game publisher would probably think twice before giving an early exclusive to that publication again? Would it also be safe to say that business executives for that publication would be upset at losing another source of revenue (especially one as simple as simply putting up their content a little earlier than other places), and that we’d have another sort of “Gamespot” situation? It certainly seems like a recipe for corruption.

Now, I’m not suggesting that IGN’s extremely positive review of GTA4 was necessarily influenced by the fact that it was “exclusive”, especially in light of several other publications now giving similarly positive reviews. This does actually suggest a sort of “built-in” check against using the “exclusive” review to corrupt the system. First, as soon as other reviewers are able to have their say, it’ll probably look out of place if you’re “exclusive” review is substantially higher than everyone else’s. Additionally, it seems unlikely that a game publisher would give an exclusive early review to ANY reviewer if they knew their game wasn’t very good. Why would they risk the possible damage they could do to their game? Essentially, the games that are typically given “exclusive” reviews are probably pretty decent games anyway, where positive reviews wouldn’t be all that out of place.

Then again, it’s sometimes hard to say. I don’t really keep close track of these things, but I did buy an OXM a few months ago that had an “exclusive” review of Turok, which they gave a 7.0, right in line with the Gamerankings average. That would suggest that the review, despite not being extremely positive (although not exactly that negative either) wasn’t really influenced by its “exclusive” status. Mass Effect, on the other hand, was exclusively reviewed by Game Informer, who gave it one of the highest scores out of any other reviewer (a 9.75). Still, even it’s Gamerankings average of 90.8% suggests a pretty strong game, and a 9.75 review wouldn’t be that atypical for games that rank that highly.

What does everyone else think? Are exclusive reviews actually problematic, or is this a case of worrying too much over nothing? The “purist” part of me thinks that reviewers probably shouldn’t cast doubt over the legitimacy of their reviews by simply releasing a review early, but the practical part of me wonders whether “exclusives” are just another necessary evil to keep both online and print publications from going under, and that the “problem” of them is mostly negated by the other factors mentioned above.