You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. At least, that’s how it is when it comes to game reviews and previews. Provide soft, fluffy reviews that start at 8 — and only go up — and you’re doing a disservice to your readers by catering to the game companies who advertise in your magazine. Provide hard-edged, honest reviews that tell it like it is and the company pulls its ads to punish you. In the wake of Gerstmanngate, writing up a negative review of a game would seem to be the fastest way to end up in the unemployment line, but what happens when the entire magazine suffers at the hands of a miffed game company? If you’re Dan Hsu, you call them out.

In the February issue of “Electronic Gaming Monthly” (page 10, reprinted on his blog), Editorial Director Dan Hsu wrote that, “It used to be game companies would pull advertising if they wanted to punish a magazine for unfavorable coverage. In more recent times, they’re pulling the coverage as well.” It would appear that Midway, Sony, and Ubisoft have outright banned “EGM” from doing any coverage of their games by withholding content — citing low review scores and unfavorable coverage as a few of the many reasons for such.

No one likes to be criticized. I can’t imagine anyone willing to spend millions of dollars on a labor force of coders and artists — let alone the costs of marketing, publishing, and distribution — who would be thrilled to see their game receive a 6-out-of-10 or lower. Even if the game was a “cheap” movie-license meant to generate some revenue to fund larger projects, it would be like getting a glass that’s half-empty and acting as though it were half-full. But this isn’t about criticism, it’s about business. Very often, publishers aren’t interested in getting a high score simply to see their craft gain merit, but rather to entice potential customers into purchasing their game. To them, previews are merely a way of keeping the public aware of a game in order to build hype while reviews are little more than a marketing gimmick — a way of saying, “Our game is worth more than theirs, so buy ours instead.”

All too often, game development comes down to putting forth the cheapest, least amount of effort to get a game out the door as soon as possible in order to maximize on its gains. This is why experimental, innovative games are so few and far between — publishers are unwilling to risk investing in a game no one is going to understand. When you spend so little and push for sooner release dates, features get cut, play modes are left out, and lots of little bugs crop up that wouldn’t have been there had the game completed an extended phase of play testing and bug fixing. All of this adds up to a lackluster game that could have been better if given a little spit and polish — although some games simply have no redeeming value, whatsoever.

As troubling as all of this is, it hardly spells the end of gaming. If magazines and other media outlets can’t review these games, it seems unlikely they’ll have much else to say about them. From a certain point of view, that’s actually a good thing. While it makes for less content for the magazine, it means that the only games we’ll hear about are the ones publishers are confident enough in to send out for review. It could mean less “shovel-ware” — bad games produced just to make a quick buck — from third-party developers. It could mean more time spent focusing on games that are worth playing. It could actually do tremendous good for the game industry, assuming that the only games we hear about are games that are good. But what does this mean for a game like “Assassin’s Creed”?

Ubisoft, one of the developers outed by Dan Hsu, was angry enough with 1UP’s coverage of “Assassin’s Creed” to initiate banning 1UP from future coverage of their games. The game itself was extremely polarizing: while it received harsh criticism and extremely low scores — in the review of the PS3 version, Michael Donahoe cites the game for being repetitive and having difficult controls, but still found it fun enough to crave a sequel where these problems might be corrected — it still became a very popular game and sold rather well. The critics’ reviews, if anything, only proved one fact: the best way to know if a game is good is to play it yourself. Still, that doesn’t stop a lot of people from assuming that game reviewers are, somehow, infallible beings — incapable of delivering a bad review from time to time. But had Ubisoft pulled coverage of the game early on, is it likely that it would have sold as well as it did? It’s hard to say; the game was incredibly hyped — regardless of what critics thought about it. Still, I have to assume that it would have been far worse not to show anything at all. I believe that Ubisoft — like Midway and Sony — are only hurting themselves.

In the end, Hsu posits the question, “What do we do now?”, which he answers with, “Nothing.” His move is to not treat these companies or their products any differently. He insists that they will continue to cover these companies and their products as best they can and that EGM will continue to be written for its readers. Huzzah.