This article went a bit in a different direction that I expected, but of course it is much bigger issue than just this one story so this subject could very well merit a series or community call-out.

It seems like people are much more worried about getting posts on their sites than they are ferreting out these posts. I can understand the desire, and can't say I am not guilty of throwing together a quick post off a half-though and posting it just to see what the reaction is.

Still, I am a guy who just writes about games for fun. How do people who actually get PAID to write about games justify their half-assery?

Posts like the ones about Greenberg's twitter quote are becoming to rule, not the exception. Some jerkwad from one of the console holders says some BS fanboy baiting line and all of a sudden the "press" decides to copy and paste that quote and then write a few pithy lines and press the post button without even stopping to think about how they could make a better story.

From magazine covers being on sale, to just plain lazy reporting, to people discussing games on their podcasts just because they have friends at the development team- the game media seems to be on a slippery slope and riding a sled down it to lowest common denominator journalismville as quickly as possible.

Also- they are not being led downhill by the people they would like to claim are the harbingers of the doom of games journalism- the small blogs. No! They are being led there by the by the big-boys like IGN, Kotaku, Joystiq... this list could go on and on.

Show me a game journalism site and I bet in a relatively small amount of time I could discover something they are doing wrong, lazy or just plain corrupt.

Happy E3 week everyone! Lets all read articles about the whiny press complaining that they have to go to parties and drink and actually work a smidgen hard for a few days!!

I've only recently discovered Bitmob and have been pleasantly surprised to find writing and THOUGHT of quality about the gaming world. You guys are doing a great job and I am pleased to be able to read you after growing dissatisfied with the vapid house style at Destructoid and the fluff found in so many other gaming 'journalism' outlets. 

Take everything with a grain of salt. Visiting a site like Destructoid you come to expect things like that, and even to a lesser degree with Bitmob. Even though it might upset you it's just the way the world is.

N'gai Croal a few years ago was on Michael Abbots podcast BrainyGamer and basically said something to the effect that keep doing what you are doing, don't try to be like the big guy. Just write what you want to write about and you'll develop your own community who want the same. I think in a lot of ways that is what BitMob is to a lot of people and even though it might not get the traffic like other websites it does have a community of people who are seeking this particular kind of writing/journalism. 

It would be one thing if people interpreted the data too, but it always seems like they just quote the numbers.  What does Halo 3 selling 3 times ANY title on PS3 by it's lonesome mean to MS and Sony?  You could come up with some interesting hypotheses... 360 is the shooter platform and a much higher of people on 360 buy shooters, etc.

Bitmob is definitely significantly more thoughtful in it's content than most places... via la mob!

I actually had to stop reading Destructoid because of things like this. I have two major problems with that site. First of all, it was created just so one guy could have a legitimate way to attend e3. Secondly, Jim Sterling. He considers himself as "some hobbyist who's just trying to have fun writing on the Internet." That doesn't sound like a journalist to me, and given his sense of humor, I liked reading his articles. The issue is that he doesn't publicize it enough (it took me 20 minutes to find where I had originally read where he typed that) and so the community winds up taking him seriously.

So kudos to everyone here for trying to make writing about gaming something a little more serious, honest, and accurate.

I don't read Dtoid very often, but it seems to me that Jim Sterling and others (but especially Sterling) pride themselves on the fact that they are NOT journalists. 

Rob, I completely understand where you're coming from. However, if Sterling took a look at this article, he'd probably just make fun of it.  Maybe the real problem is that gamers don't really care about the integrity of the journalism, but rather the opportunity to subscribe to a cult of personality.  Sterling, as a blogger, is extremely successful in his ability to serve content to a massive, like-minded audience, and he is rewarded for this.  Is he a journalist?  No, and he knows this.  That's not the image he's trying to sell.

I hardly ever leave comments, but I have to say, this could be the most important article that has ever been put on this site.  Not only does this call out a horrible practice, it calls out a horrible person who writes things for attention, Jim Sterling.  This is the same guy who said Deadly Premonition was amazing and Heavy Rain was horrible, just to rile people up.  He wrote an article about the impact of the last episode of Lost on gaming and it was one word:  "Nothing."  Destructoid is an embarrassment and makes a poor reflection on people involved in gaming culture.

I really believe that games journalism needs to get more professional, stand up together and fight the PR machine that the game industry has become, and start writing pieces about games, gaming, and it's related culture, not just news.  I'm a big proponent of the latter, as I don't enjoy writing reviews, previews, or news, I enjoy writing about the culture and the history.  Magazines like Kill Screen and sites like this where there is more writing in that style are hopefully the future, or any kind of respectable games journalism is doomed.

I very much agree with the sentiment of this piece. Much of games writing is (unfortunately) dependent on game companies for resources, but this goes beyond even that, as what was written was in no way dependent on any resources except what the writer found out. It sort of speaks to a bigger trend of lazy news gathering. Many sites just play follow the leader when it comes to reporting in favor of getting the story up fast. Pair that with non-news like controversial developer quotes and you have a games writing culture that revolves around hits. It's really upsetting.

Now I have an honest question: Isn't VGChartz notorious for being consistently inaccurate with their figures?

@Jeremy & Juan - Most any reports of the such, be it NPD, VGChartz, or even the movie ticket grosses are somewhat inaccurate as they are all estimates anyway. Where VGChartz, I believe, has picked up most of the skepticism is that they (it may have changed but I'm not aware of any changes) don't reveal their sources. As such, if someone wanted to verify NPD figures, they could and people generally trust them. That VGChartz's figures don't always match up with NPD causes mistrust for many

@Gerren Well it's not just that, but their numbers are often retroactively changed to match with NPD numbers. This is seen often enough that it isn't just anomalies. And yes, that they don't report their sources is also suspect. Here's the investigative article I was shown on the issue:

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/06/analysis_what_vgchartz_does_and.php

In short, it seems that the site can be useful when it comes to older games whose sales have flatlined since they seem to retroactively match NPDs, but it shouldn't be considered a reliable source when it comes to games that are still selling.

It's a shame, since that seems to be the only free resource that normal people can look at, which is a neat concept. But I guess you get what you pay for in this case.

Would a film critic ever visit the set of an upcoming film or watch a screening in hawaii all expenses paid?  No. . . but for some reason this is the norm in the video game industry. This article illustrates how the video game PR firms are playing video game journalists.

Would a film critic ever visit the set of an upcoming film or watch a screening in hawaii all expenses paid?  No. . . but for some reason this is the norm in the video game industry. This article illustrates how the video game PR firms are playing video game journalists.

Very, very, very good article. I find it funny how shallow Aaron Greenberg sounds in his tweet. He makes himself, and the company, seem like the only way to call a true victory is to simply count how much money you have compared to the competition. That isn't the way things work. You know how I called a winner in this console race?? I played all the games and decided which exclusives I like more. I enjoyed all of the PS3 exclusives he claims sold poorly more than I did any Halo game. However, I still play my 360 as well as my PS3. Why? Because I will never be like Aaron Greenberg.

We all already know he stretched the truth with his quote. Hell, let's just come out and say it. He LIED. However, he is also planning on gaining support for his company through half-truths and deception. For me, that makes him the enemy. We have all seen it before. Nintendo willl spin the numbers to make them look good. Microsoft will get one of their big wigs to claim victory in a race long before it is over. And all it does is confuse and anger people. It never helps their cause.

I understand that his numbers must be different than what we the public sees. His numbers very well may have told him that Halo 3 outsold all of those PS3 games. He also knows damn well the large margin for error in those numbers. They can be off by hundreds of thousands of units. Yet he still took to the internet to vomit his gloating mouth, knowing damn well it wasn't all the truth. That makes him an enemy to me. That means that, above all, lying for your company is more important than the trust of your customers. That is NOT a man I want to know, or help employ by buying their products.

Destructoid is not a journalistic site. At least, that's what they claim. When they attempt something journalistic, they're journalists. When they're getting flack over posts, they're "just a blog."

I hope someday, I get my own hat that says "Journalist" on it, one I can take off and put on when it suits my purposes.

Ed- If you get that pissed every time a guy from the console holders spews BS like this then pretty soon you won't be buying products from any of them. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all like to pull out fake ass numbers and "facts".

I would be a lot more worried about the people in the media reporting those "facts" as truths than I would be the console holders BS PR statements.

Just watch the E3 press conferences and I promise you will see more made up numbers than you could possibly want. A few might be true, but they will all be uttered to make their company look the best.

Wow, good call Rob!

You guys are great. Starting today, I going to turn off the ad-blocking for BitMob.com :)

@Rob -

I've been thinking about this for almost a full 24 hours and I keep coming back to the same question: When you ask "Are we not journalists?" who do you mean by "we?"

Stating the question that way makes "us" sound like an amorphous blob of people, but isn't there a wide disparity of types of video game writers? Jim Sterling, for instance, is not a journalist, nor does he pretend to be. He wanted to be a comedian many years ago, and ostensibly that's how he approaches his games writing. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw is also a comedian by trade, but happens to produce Zero Punctuation for The Escapist. Is it even proper to attempt to hold either of these gentlemen up to standards of "journalism?"

GameSpot is the biggest site out there...but are their writers "journalists?" They conduct interviews with industry luminaries, get primo access to events like E3 and the GDC, write up product previews and reviews...from the strictest definition of the word yes, they are "journalists," but that strict definition has nothing to do with bias-neutrality...and considering how GameSpot makes their money (http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?publicUserId=4561231&bId=8587828) does it really make sense to hold their writers to these sorts of ethical standards you're implying they should adhere to?

Last night, Microsoft held their big invite-only Kinect event.  Aaron Greenberg, director of product management for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, told GameSpot that "Sunday is about entertainment, Monday is about information." So, in other words, all these "games journalists" got together so that Microsoft could throw a show for them. Doesn't that tell us everything we need to know about the true nature of "our" industry?

When I tell people what I'm doing with my life right now, i.e. writing here on Bitmob and on my blog and being the EiC of an indie site, I don't tell them that my ambition is to be a "games journalist." I tell them that i want to be a "games writer," because it's not only more honest, but more accurate. Geoff Keighley, the most successful "games journalist" around, doesn't do a whole lot of games journalism. He's a television producer, program host, and interviewer. He has bemoaned the lack of investigative journalism in games reporting, himself - because it doesn't really exist. I think the closest thing I've seen to it was when Patrick "The Scoop" Klepek over at G4 broke the news about the West/Zampella drama at Infinity Ward.

I think we first need to ask ourselves who out there in the games writing world actually thinks of themselves as a "journalist," without bullshitting themselves, and THEN ask whether or not they are holding themselves up to the strictest standards of their craft, i.e. fact-checking and making sure their quotes are 100% accurate.

I don't consider anyone at Kotaku, Joystiq, IGN, G4, or GameSpot to be "journalists." I think of them as "entertainment writers." They have more in common with writers from Variety or Entertainment Weekly than any writer I've seen in a local or national newspaper who I would think of as a "journalist.".

Most of what I've read over at GamePro and The Escapist have been "editorials," not news reports. I think of those sites as one big opinion page (which is not a bad thing IMHO), and I think of the writers I read over there as "editorialists." I don't have any allegiance to any site, so I get my "news" from elsewhere and only read what's unique to those sites, i.e. the editorials.

I think the three sites that would quality most accurately as "journalism" would be Gamasutra, Develop, and Edge...and they all seem to be highly reputable websites with solid, ethical writing. I bet they do actually check their facts, becuase I never hear anyone complaining about them being slipshod or shoddy in their reporting.

In light of all this...I feel as though your piece here, Rob, is really bemoaning the fact that the most popular gaming sites aren't about journalism at all, but rather about entertainment. I wonder to what degree the audience is responsible for this, however, not in the sense of their doing anything wrong, but rather in the way most gamers relate to video games. For 32 years of my life they were nothing but entertainment for me, receiving no more critical thought than I apply to movies or television, both of which I recognize as 90% utter garbage and 9% "fun to watch" content, with maybe 1% of the total programming actually holding some real depth or appeal as an artistic version of that content.

If that's how most gamers look at video games, then it makes perfect sense that the pure entertainment sites are the most successful, doesn't it?

Also, take a look at the video reaction to the Kinect event last night on Destructoid. Jim Sterling may not be a journalist, but I'm beginning to understand what people see in him. Does anyone want to take any bets that anyone over at Kotaku, Joystiq, G4, GameSpot, or IGN will have the balls to say what he said, which is probably as close to the truth as anyone will ever say? Everything I'm reading about that MS event last night makes it sound like a garish, ridiculous display that had absolutely nothing to do with gaming, a superfluous waste of money that could have been cancelled, and rather let the games writers just attend the MS conference today and actually see details about the software to write up for their readers.

The advantage of being a blogger versus a journalist is that you can speak your mind without fear of repercussion, I guess, because you've made it clear what kind of writer you are from the outset. It's something to think about.

@Dennis

You're right!  I just watched the Destructoid reaction video (http://tinyurl.com/265nvbm) based on your recommendation, and it seems that Sterling is possibly more passionate about video games and anti-pulbic-relations-shilling than any other games journalist I can name off the top of my head.  Luke Smith comes close to that fever pitch, as he was very vocal about his problems with the game journo business and PR relations.

To anyone who hasn't watched that Destructoid reaction vid, do it.  At least the first section, when Sterling grabs the mic and does his thing.   Don't know why they had to throw the F-bomb around so much, but I'm an obscenity prude, I guess.  Certainly helps put the "journalist vs. entertainment blogger" question into context, given that this sort of video would never be posted on, say, CNN.