Third screenshot for Mass Effect 2: Arrival DLC

Well, the multi-million dollar developers/publishers have the poor-as-hell games media over a barrel. If you don't cover their p!ss-poor PR stunts and lame photos, they complain and will lock you out of exclusives, giveaways, early access to their games and so on.

What you get is an industry populated by people who have to copy and paste the developer's PR just to survive.

It's a criticism of an industry that is now so big and powerful that it has outgrown the media that in other industries would keep it in check and from being the bloated monster it is now.

If you only look at blogs perhaps. But there are many more profitable magazines and newspapers that employ actual entertainment journalists and trained writers to do more than just copy and paste.

Magazines like Empire, Rolling Stone etc will - to a degree - actually expose any corruption or lame/dirty PR tactics. Apart from magazines, lots of newspapers and TV stations also have entertainment reporters paid to actually find the good AND the bad. That simply doesn't happen much from the games media because it is poorly paid and not investigative in nature. Plus there is no celebrity angle.

If they cover games, most newspapers and entertainment mags doa really basic job.

If a movie doesn't get coverage in the top few major media outlets, it would probably tank, so they depend on the media and the media depends on it. It's a lot harder for them to manipulate a media that has its own powerful and recognisable people. Even in Australia we have David and Margaret, Angela Bishop and the like who no smart studio would threaten.

I'm not sure that a game would tank if the top few game sites and magazines offered minimal coverage because the power is spread out so thinly. The target market for games is also generally more tech savvy and not traditional consumers of TV and nerwspapers. We get our game news from many different places, including straight from the games company websites themselves. Plus there are no real celebrity game writers who hold much power.

Ha ha because we're young (ish) and tech-savvy.

But the negative effect is that we as consumers aren't giving anyone in the games media a lot of power (or money) to put the pressure back on the game PR agencies. TV and newspapers still have that power. Plus it helps that most major media outlets also have a stake in a movie company, so they try and dig dirt on each other which keeps the industry balanced.

KP - it's a broader issue we were discussing than this one screenshot, but point made.

Just for the record, I wasn't talking about PALGN particularly Cian, but raising the broader issue of how games media are forced to be an extension of a publisher's PR firm and be pressured in covering games. I didn't count PALGN in the top games media outlets, as good as the site is. Although I know it has happened to PALGN too.