As John carefully detailed before his departure, RPS was founded by four freelance writers who were frustrated by the falling rates they were being paid. Though those founders are gone, almost all those of us left behind (abandoned, dirty, grieving) were freelance ourselves at one point or another and have dealt with the same frustrations. So here's a thing: we're increasing our freelance rates. If…
Posts tagged “Games Journalism Journalism”
We try to steer clear of journalism-journalism around here, but it's a strange, sad day for anyone who's been involved with or followed the UK games journo scene for a while. Friend-of-RPS Tom "Tom Bramwell" Bramwell is leaving Eurogamer after 15 years today, and Future Publishing is closing CVG after 33 years of life.
Question: what good does a news post announcing a game's release date do you, a reader? Anticipating games you already want can be fun, but for ones you're uncertain about or haven't heard of, how useful is a release date announcement? Might it be better to hear when a game is out, when we can all know and say more about it? I ask because…
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Games journalism, back when we were all young bucks with spotty faces and an infinite capacity for fizzy lager drinks, used to work like this: you’d be sent game review code far in advance of its release, and you’d be able to publish your review days or even weeks before street-date. This system was expected and indeed necessary for magazines, with their weeks-long production cycle…
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I wasn't really following the Mafia II is-it-good-or-nob controversy, for the simple reason that I thought it was probably a little bit nob. When the initial reviews came in, there was a clear division between people who thought it was a bit of a disappointment and people who thought it was supa-dupa-fly. To be honest, I presumed that the people who liked it were presumably…
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Spoilers have been on my mind. Not the Darth Vader is Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense way, but whether the way we think about and talk about spoilers in reviews are actually appropriate for the form. In short: we spend a lot of time debating about things which barely affect our experiences at all while tearing other things free from the still living torso…
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Well, everyone else is doing it, we probably should too. The forthcoming issue of videogame bible Edge has a large feature on Eidos Montreal's development of Deus Ex 3. To tease it, Edge Online runs a short story with the headline "Deus Ex was “Kinda Slow” Says Deus Ex 3 Dev" before offering a quote from Lead Designer Jean-Francois Dugas: "There weren’t enough exciting, memorable…
A few months back, I met up with EA Mythic's vocal Creative Director in a bar near London Liverpool Street Station. We ordered drinks. We set the tape rolling. After three hours, I stopped the dictaphone and we stumbled off. We'd covered a lot of ground - pretty much everything away from Warhammer itself, which was out of bounds for the usual PR-reasons. Since the…