You can’t trust the news. News on anything is always looking for it’s ‘angle’. I hate that. I’m an intelligent 38 year old human. I can absorb data, and facts and draw upon previous knowledge to generate my opinon. Yet the news, be it global or the games industry news, is laways trying to tell me what to think.
I don’t need the commentators ‘take’ on whats happened in georgia. I want the facts. I will decide what I think about it. And when it comes to a new game, I don’t want hyperbole from some marketing drone that tells me how awesome it is. I want to know what the games about., how it plays, and what’s different about it. Anything that paints a game in a positive light in a press release is clearly pointless.
The most obvious games industry examples of all this are sales figures. For example, check out the awesome sales figures for Castle Crashers on the xbox!!! or check out the tragically disappointing sales of crysis. what a disaster!!! What we don’t have stories on is the 99% of games that sit in the middle of this range. How many copies did Sim City Societies sell? or Pirates of The Burning Sea? or Enemy Territory: Quake wars?
We don’t see headlines about them, because journalists think that unless something is extreme, and they can get an ‘angle’ on it, it’s irrelevant. They also, sensibly realise that just reporting the facts means they are pretty much out of a skilled job. Still… it bugs me. I like to know the facts behind things. I know that which facts you select introduces massive bias, but I’d be happy just with a toning down of the current obsession with having a news ‘angle’. Just throw in a bit of perspective now and then. Don’t quote me the sales figures of a game without comparing it to 3 or 4 others of the same genre and platform over the same time period. Don’t talk about a massive rise in home repossesions, if it’s gone from 0.001% to 0.0015%. Sometimes it’s not clear who the good guys are, or its not clear what to conclude from what has happened. We are adults, we can handle that.