Starfield review controversy traces game journalism's orbital decay | This Week in Business
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Starfield launches today for those who paid extra for the Premium edition, so in the grand tradition of Bethesda games, we're going to talk about how broken stuff is.
No, not Starfield stuff. For all I know, the game has been polished to a shine with nary a glitch in sight.
Instead, we're going to talk about how buggy and broken games journalism is, prompted in part by a mini-scandal around who got review codes in advance, and who didn't.
QUOTE | "Access to the game appears to have been heavily restricted in the UK, where Bethesda has also not provided copies of Starfield to other websites and YouTube channels owned by Eurogamer parent company Reedpop." – On Tuesday, Eurogamer editor-in-chief Tom Phillips explained to readers that Eurogamer would not have a review of Starfield in time for Thursday's embargo.
Writers from UK-based outlets The Guardian, Edge, and Metro also publicly confirmed they had not received review codes of the game.
GamesIndustry.biz also did not receive a review code, which could be because we're also owned by Reedpop, because we don't actually review games, or because the one time we did run a review, we gave the biggest game of the year a zero out of ten.
There's been a lot of speculation about why Bethesda snubbed specifically these sites for Starfield, and a lot of it doesn't really hold water.
Was it revenge for scathing reviews of Bethesda Game Studios' last big title, Fallout 76? That game reviewed poorly everywhere, and some of the
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