Going for the gold

Perhaps you are familiar with the saying, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Or, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Or, “You really stepped in it, buddy.”

Some 9 months ago, we published a definitive PC Gamer reviews policy. It pledged that we would review only finished game code; that said game code would be from the gold master version the publisher uses to create the discs that end up in retail boxes or the equivalents; that MMO and multiplayer-only games would be reviewed in a setting that replicates the consumer experience; and that as such, we’d only review MMOs and MP-only games when we could play them against the general populace.

We have adhered to every letter of this reviews policy. And do you know what we’ve discovered? It totally doesn’t work.

Waiting for master discs and the opportunity to play an MMO against the rest of the world is making it almost impossible for us to get you reviews you can actually use to make decisions about what games to buy—the time it takes a publisher to replicate the discs and ship them to stores is so short, there’s not enough time for us to see the code in between. As a result, we feel like the quality of PC Gamer is suffering. Our job isn’t to just info-dump details onto you, but also to show you a good time. Doing that well means taking the time to craft our stories, and we can’t do that when we’re making eleventh-hour adjustments because a disc didn’t show up. In most cases, the difference between “finished code” and “gold master” is just Games for Windows certification, anyway.

So, let it never be said that I don’t own up to my mistakes. We’re tweaking the policy so we can get the best information to you in the timeliest manner: PC Gamer will only review finished game code, meaning code that the game’s developer has deemed finished and reviewable, and we will review MMO and multiplayer-only games in a setting that replicates the consumer experience, which we’ll create, if we have to. Developers have no incentive to give us unfinished code and call it finished—after all, we’ll continue to harsh on any problems we find, and we do not re-review games. And, as we learned while reviewing Left 4 Dead this month, you don’t need to play a multiplayer game with unseen strangers to find out if it’s a good game—you just need to create a situation that replicates the one you’d get at home.

December 5, 2008