The practice of the review guarantee is, obviously, disturbing for those who’d like to imagine that the scores we see in the enthusiast press– the ones who are supposed to represent the hardcore audience, and whose scores go on to determine GameRankings averages (and from there on, in some cases, to promotions or bonuses for employees associated with the game)– might retain some modicum of objectivity, no matter how misinformed or disagreeable. But if you are shocked, or even surprised at all by this, you shouldn’t be.

Even with no knowledge of the business side of the game industry, any reasonably observant person ought to be able to detect some hints of the close relationship between publishers and the press simply by thumbing through a few issues of these magazines. Most people’s initial thought is that the magazines depend heavily upon advertising money from the big publishers– so why would they bite the hand that feeds them by publishing negative reviews?

This is true, but the dependency runs much deeper than this. The entire industry of video game news rests on a foundation of content that can only come from the intellectual property owners. In other words, it is at the publisher’s sole discretion to release any information on an upcoming game, which makes an enthusiast magazine entirely subject to the publisher’s whim if they want to have a story at all. And because all the enthusiast magazines are all very similar, their chief competitive weapon is their exclusive content.

What this does is put the publishers (or developers, as the case may be) into an extremely powerful position. They can offer the magazines exclusives– screenshots, concept art, access to the developers for interviews, and so on– and ask for much in return: the cover of an issue, a minimum number of pages inside dedicated to the game, or even the guaranteed minimum review score I mentioned above. This is the stage that’s set when publishers and enthusiast magazines sit down to bargain.

As for the actual score-guaranteed review, when it is finally published in reference to the complete game, one is hard-pressed to say it actually suffers. Any half-clever writer can emphasize traits and make comparisons in such a way that an arbitrarily chosen score seems justified. We might read that the game accomplishes what it set out to do, or that it is simple fun for the right audience, or that it is the best of its narrowly-defined kind. In the end, reviews are simply opinions, which can vary widely, and which have for centuries been bought and sold.