Reviewing Games is Hard

Noting they still don’t have a review copy of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, GameSpot’s Reality Check editorializes on why reviewing games is hard, though in actuality the editorial is about the difficulties of the pre-release review copy system.

For starters, contrary to what you might think, we don’t always get copies of games far enough in advance of their arrival on shelves to facilitate release-date reviews. At the time of this writing, we’ve just received PlayStation 3 and PC copies of Brink (in stores today), we’ve yet to receive MX vs. ATV Alive (also in stores today), and it’s looking like we might not get our hands on The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (in stores next week) this side of the weekend. Historically, receiving a game too late to turn around a review ahead of its release date was often indicative of a publisher’s lack of confidence in its product. That’s still the case occasionally, but increasingly even great games aren’t being sent out for review in a timely fashion. In fairness, the fact that we insist on reviewing finished games on retail hardware probably doesn’t help matters, but that’s the only way we can be sure that we’re reviewing exactly the same game that’s going to be sold in stores. The unacceptable alternative is to base our reviews on code that isn’t 100 percent final and that, more often than not, arrives in the mail with a list of caveats detailing problems that will really, totally, honestly be fixed before the game ships. Sadly, even our policy of reviewing retail copies of games doesn’t always ensure that we have the same experience you will.