Lately I’ve come to a sad conclusion. And it’s this: most people have absolutely no freaking clue what goes into being a game reviewer.
They have no idea what goes into being any kind of reviewer.
And that includes the makers of the things reviewers review.
So I wanted to take some time to bore the heck out of everyone today by explaining 2 main things, to clear up some confusion. 1) What a reviewer is/does, and 2) what goes into reviewing.
What a reviewer is/does
It’s easy to say that a reviewer, well, reviews things. That’s obvious. But there’s this weird idea within the gaming world that reviewers are somehow ruining the industry, that reviewers ought to be “more objective” with their reviews, and that they ought to be reflections of the general public consensus.
And just… no. None of that. At all.
Reviewers are, at their heart, a piece of the audience with a platform. That’s it. That’s all we are. Whatever we’re reviewing, we’re reviewing from the standpoint of people who read/played/watched/heard a thing and are now giving you our opinions on it.
Which means expecting pure objectivity is pretty much impossible. And asking for it is going to get you nowhere. Reviews are the reviewer’s opinions, stated as eloquently as we can state them, with citations to back up why we thought a thing. That’s what a review is supposed to be. If you have a reviewer writing their opinions on something, that means they’re doing their job.
And that seems to be deeply misunderstood. I don’t know why. I can hazard a guess, but none of those guesses are very flattering toward those making the accusations.
And this even extends to game developers misunderstanding what reviewers are there for. Reviewers can often face blame by game devs for tanking a game’s sales, for not rating a game highly enough, for not giving it enough praise, and I’m just like… Do you think that’s all reviewers are for? Do you think reviewers are just mouthpieces that exist solely to talk about only the things you want talked about, and only in the way you want to hear them?
Because I think you might need to take a step back and learn something about what reviewers are actually there for. You want talking points, hire a PR rep. You want to know what the opinions of people are? Look to the reviewers.
Now, individual reviewers will not reflect the whole of public consensus. We’re individuals. As I said, we’re players with a platform. The only thing that makes us different than players without a platform is the platform. We made the decision to put our opinions out there for others to read or watch or hear, and maybe our experiences in life and in an industry have taught us buzzwords and how to state things clearly, but that’s it. When you read a review, you’re reading the opinions and experience of one reviewer.
See, the point of reviewers isn’t to be PR mouthpieces or to praise things universally. It’s to give our opinions, and our reasons for those opinions, so that other like-minded people can find things they might not otherwise have. If I find a reviewer who enjoys the same games I do and the same things about those games, then chances are I’m going to take their opinions more seriously than, say, a random reviewer who primarily enjoys games I don’t really enjoy myself. That doesn’t make either of us wrong. It doesn’t mean one of us likes good games and the other likes bad games. It probably doesn’t even reflect on the [highly subjective] quality of those games themselves. It’s just people, reaching out to other people, letting them know some stuff they might like and why they might like it.
I kind of feel like this shouldn’t be a revelation, that it should be obvious, but I have seen some of the hate that reviewers get, the accusations that they’re ruining the industry, constant outcry that reviewers are useless and the work they do is pointless. I’ve seen how badly people misunderstand what a review is for. So while I’d like to think that I just stated the obvious up there, I know logically that I didn’t. People legitimately don’t know this stuff sometimes.
As for the idea that reviewers are ruining the industry… I mean, do you think reviewers get early review codes for games because devs and publishers are addicted to self-sabotage? Why would they do that if reviews are useless and bad and reviewers should be shut up before they can speak?
It’s the hope of every maker-of-things that the thing they make will be well-received. This isn’t always the case, and that sucks on many levels, but it’s part of putting your art out there for the public to interact with. So review codes and copies are supposed to go out to reviewers that are most likely to look upon the game favourably and speak favourably about it, to get positivity out there and to appeal to the people who regularly look to that reviewer for recommendations.
This doesn’t always happen. Especially when the reviewers aren’t vetted. If you just arbitrarily send review codes to every reviewer, you’re more likely to encounter someone who doesn’t have time to play and review it, or wasn’t the right audience for what you were pitching. (Big reviewers encounter this a lot, because everyone wants the publicity that can be drummed up by a big name with a big audience.) Reviewers are more than just positivity mouthpieces, yes, but I can’t deny that’s what everyone hopes from us, because increased praise can lead to increased sales.
That’s the hope.
That’s also all the compensation that most reviewers get, if they’re lucky. A free review copy of a game. And by free, I mean “free,” because even if we didn’t pay money for it, it’s not like we did no work for it.
Which brings me to…
What goes into reviewing?
Another complaint I see about reviewers is that they only play a little bit of the game before writing their review. They don’t play the full thing, don’t do a 100% completion run, don’t explore everywhere and see everything before formulating their opinions.
And… yeah, no shit. You think we have time to give every game a full playthrough when a lot of big games can take between 10 and 100 hours to complete these days? That’s a fucking lot to ask of someone, especially when review codes don’t go out early enough because the last piece of a game’s development cycle is typically devoted to crunch just to get a game in a probably-releasable state. If you give reviewers a code 1 week prior to release and your game is a JRPG, then no, that game is not getting a full playthrough if you want a pre-release review. It just isn’t!
But okay. Let’s assume you give out that JRPG review code a full month prior to release, and your game is as tested and complete as you can possibly make it so that the reviewer has essentially the final build. Your game takes an expected 40 hours to beat.
So here’s what the reviewer is going to do in that month of time you gave them.
Well, first of all, they’re probably not going to devote the whole month to focusing solely on your game, because the Internet content mill is relentless and unless someone’s releasing regular content, they’re risking fading into obscurity, so chances are that reviewer has more than just your game to focus on. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that it is all they have to focus on.
Here’s what that reviewer will probably be doing.
First, they’re going to play the game. Obviously. 40 hours of play time is a full workweek, so if they play your game for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, they’ll beat it in a week. Seems easy enough, until you reflect that playing a game for 8 hours a day, nearly every day, is actually something that most gamers don’t do. But this reviewer does reviews as part of a regular paid job, and so they’re making at least minimum wage for every hour they work, and so they’re not trying to juggle reviewing alongside something else that pays their bills. You got lucky with this one, hypothetical game dev!
Now, chances are it’ll take them a bit longer than just 40 hours to beat the game, because they’ll probably be making notes as they play, things they want to discuss in their final review, things they found particularly good or particularly bad, etc. But maybe that only adds on 2 hours. They pull some overtime. No big deal.
Then comes the writing of the review.
And I’m assuming it’s a written review here, because video reviews? Whole different beast! But yes, a written review. So. They’ll compile their notes. Sit down, put fingers to keyboard, write up their thoughts and opinions in a coherent way that they know their audience will find easily digestible and appealing.
They’ll add screenshots. Maybe seek out and link some gameplay footage. Hunt down some data from developer interviews that will add context and clarity to some of what they said. Maybe this only takes them an hour. Maybe it takes them 3. It can vary between writers.
They hit the publish button and the review is out there on the Internet for all to see, with nearly 3 whole weeks before the official release date!
But the reviewer’s job isn’t done. No. They’re cross-posting the review to various sites that don’t auto-collect reviews from all over the place. They’re spreading links on social media. They’re still maintaining their presence and talking with their audience so that they stay relevant and so that people see them as a trusted source of information and opinions. They’re answering emails, speaking with coworkers, maintaining their website or blog.
Which, I should add, they were probably doing the entire prior week, too, because that’s part of their job. Heck, such an active social media presence, such audience trust, is why you wanted them to review your game in the first place.
Let’s say that emails and social media stuff only takes up 1 single hour of the day. Each workday. Every workday. Now the work behind that 40-hour game has ballooned to 48-50 hours. Assuming 8-hour shifts, they have now devoted almost 7 full workdays of time to the very reason you wanted them to review your game in the first place.
And all that’s seen on the public end is a review that takes maybe 5-10 minutes to read through.
Yeah. Reviewing is long hours, and most of them thankless behind-the-scenes stuff that nobody ever really appreciates unless they’re also a reviewer.
And that’s just for a written review on a blog or website!
Do you have any idea what goes into editing video reviews for YouTube channels? Holy hell, that is also a massive ton of work, which may take just as long or longer than playing through the game to begin with!
And do you want to know a dirty little secret?
Most reviewers can tell what their final opinion of something will be not long after starting it.
This isn’t always the case, because sometimes games can really take us by surprise later on, but in most cases, we don’t need to play through the whole thing to get a sense of what we’re reviewing. Unless you start changing gameplay mechanics halfway through, unless there’s suddenly a huge unexpected timeline jump, unless there’s a twist to the ending that drastically changes how the entire plot can be interpreted, the reviewer probably doesn’t need to see the game’s final ending in order to figure out their general opinions.
First few hours, to maybe the first 3rd of a game. That’s typically what it takes.
And what I learned while reviewing novels also applies to reviewing video games: If you want to argue that what you made doesn’t pick up or get interesting until after the halfway point, you are asking way too much of your audience. You’re asking them to stick through hours of what you admit isn’t that great, just to get to the stuff you think is worthwhile.
And frankly, we all have better things to do with our lives.
Especially when reviewing typically isn’t a paid gig. The most game reviewers can expect to get, typically, is the occasional unpaid review copy of a game. Maybe they make some ad revenue. Maybe they occasionally get a sponsor for their videos. Maybe they’ve got some loyal fans helping them out with Patreon support. Maybe there’s the occasional reviewer like our hypothetical person above, who gets paid an hourly wage for doing what they do.
But most of us? We’re still just players with a platform. We don’t get paid for what we do, no matter how hard or how often we work. Chances are very high that we’re buying all the games we review with our own money.
And then, in addition to hours of behind-the-scenes work and no pay and the demand for regular content to keep our audience happy, we then have to hear stuff from other gamers and game devs about how we suck and we did our jobs wrong or didn’t play the game enough or in the right way or any number of complaints that reflect that most people have absolutely no freaking clue what we do do, but are plenty happy to assume we’re doing it all badly.
This is why so many reviewers get burnt out. Seriously. In the 11+ years since I first started reviewing, I have seen names come and go a lot. The demand for content means you have to prioritize what will get hype over what you really want to play. Get big enough and you’ll have more requests for your time than you have time. You’ll get in debates with others over your respective opinions, and you’ll get told you’re what’s wrong with the industry, and you’ll get told your job is so easy that anyone can do it so you shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously, and you’ll make some great friends and colleagues, and in the end, chances are you will get so sick of the sheer amount of pressure that you’re under — again, with little to no compensation — that you’ll decide the benefits aren’t worth it, that your passion for the whole thing has been crushed under the weight of everyone’s expectations (which have become your expectations too, like it or not), and you’ll probably quit reviewing.
Not everyone. But most.
I’ve seen it happen a lot. Too many times.
Let me put it this way. After a few years of me reviewing novels and getting plenty of review copies that I was enjoying, a family member asked what they could do to get “freebies” like that too. And I answered honestly.
Get a blog. Start writing your opinions of every book you read, and make sure you’re doing it coherently and cohesively so that what you’re talking about is generally understood. Get a social media presence, and share the links to your reviews. Cross-post those reviews to review sites, like Amazon or GoodReads. Start talking to other reviewers. Share what other people are talking about in regard to the books you like. And make sure to read and review pretty regularly, probably a book every 2 weeks at the absolute least, because otherwise you build an audience too slowly for anyone to pay much attention to. And then, if you do that for a few months, maybe a year, then publishers and authors might start offering you review copies of books you’re interested in.
“Oh,” this person replied. And dropped the subject.
On the surface, reviewing looks like a sweet gig. You get free stuff, and all you have to do is say some things sometimes! But in reality, it’s long unpaid thankless hours that really only other reviewers will fully understand. Even some people inside the industry, people who have every reason to better understand the role that reviewers play, misunderstand it more often than not.
So please please please consider all that reviewers do — and know what we don’t do — before going off about how we’re doing our jobs wrong and ought to be done away with. We do what we do, more often than not, out of a love of the medium, a love of the genre, a love of the industry. If you didn’t understand that before, I really hope you do now.
Quadnines 
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