Even with the extravagant, all-expenses-paid parties, consumer electronics companies and games developers don’t hand out cash enough to pay the rent, whinges GameJournoPros founder Kyle Orland in another tranche of leaked emails from the game industry’s private mailing list.

The new emails show games journalists discussing how PR representatives pay for positive coverage. “When I did marketing and PR for ASUS (a Taiwanese company), one of my coworkers casually asked me how much I paid editorial outlets to write good reviews of the products for which I was responsible,” confessed William O’Neill, a frequent poster on the list.

The conversation, which we have received only in abridged summary form, pasted below, shows James Fudge, another journalist in the group, hinting that it might cost more to bribe journalists on the west coast of America than elsewhere.

Also featured in this latest leak are comments about developer Phil Fish, with some list members expressing doubt that Fish, who notoriously quit the games industry after receiving unpleasant tweets, was ever going to release another game regardless.

“Judging him based on everything the dude has ever said or done publicly, I personally believe that he is fully capable of a tantrum on this scale. Whether or not this was planned I have no idea,” wrote Michael Rougeau, a freelance writer published at Kotaku, Complex and GameSpot.

Fish will likely be dismayed to read the dismissive tone of many comments in the thread. “I think he maybe started fez 2 as a real project, then realized he just wasn’t feeling it for whatever reason, then used twitter drama as the public excuse,” writes Kyle Orland.

The conversation about Fish was started by Nick Chester, a developer and not a journalist, which will raise questions in readers’ minds about the privileged access some developers had to journalists by being members of GameJournoPros.

The full text of this latest leak appears below, lightly edited to remove private information.





THE LATEST EMAILS