Brash Games Criticised for Repealing Former Writer Credit on Reviews

Videogame website Brash Games are facing scrutiny from former writers after removing credit for reviews they had published. Writers who chose to discontinue their employment with the publication had their names erased without prior warning.

In the form of a PAC-MAN 256 review on Brash Games’ own site, writer Ben McCurry exposed this and other apparent shady practices of Brash Games. The issues brought to light included an insight into how the website was run by Paul Ryan - the site’s sole owner. Inside Ben’s review of the Bandai Namco published endless runner, he wrote that:

"The idea of Pac-Man 256 is derived from what happens in the original Pac-Man when you clear 256 levels; on level 257, the game becomes a garbled mess that becomes unplayable. A good example of a garbled mess is Brash Games; this very website that strips authors of their writing credits when they leave the site, later attributing them to the sole owner and editor, Paul Ryan, making your work completely pointless, just as Pac-Man is completely pointless after level 256."

Ben went on to write:

"Everything that we grew to love in the original iterations is still present; the classic sound effects, the musical stings, and even ghosts. Speaking of ghosts, did you know that Brash Games deliberately ghosted themselves from Metacritic, GameRankings, and OpenCritic (marking themselves as “out of business on Meta and GR, which is an outrageous and egregious lie – it’s here right now)”

Ben stated in his review that when making the founder/review code manager aware of his intent to terminate his voluntary employment at Brash Games, he received no response or acknowledgment of such. That is, other than his reviews changing credit from his name to ‘Brash Games’ and him being removed from the staff page on BG’s site.

“Brash Games took advantage of naïve young writers, offering them no money, but exposure, which is useless when you essentially pretend your writers did not exist later on down the line.”

Ben isn’t the only writer that has been expressing his views on the matter. Another former Brash Games writer Meg Read tweeted that the same thing happened to her, posting proof of her Chibi-Robo: Zip Lash! review. It was published under the same all-encompassing name, ‘Brash Games.’

Worryingly, repealing reviewer credit isn’t the only thing Brash Games have been accused of doing. Josh Robertson on Twitter stated in a tweet that he was due to announce his contribution to Brash Games with his first article, and then said this:

Well I was suppose to announce that I'm writing for @BrashGames but they've forcibly changed my score on the first review I did sooo... — Josh Robertson #BlackLivesMatter (@JoshRobertson97) March 31, 2017

In the last couple of days, the staff list on Brash Games’ site has been wiped clean. Previously, this was populated with current writers, those under-probation, and a list of former writers too. Currently, the only name on the staff page is that of Paul Ryan. On the 6th of April, before Ben’s review was posted, Ben was showing as ‘under-probation’. His contributor page, at the time of writing this, is non-existent.

We reached out to several of the writers that had been affected by goings-on with Brash Games, including the infamous reviewer Ben McCurry and former writers Olly Smith and Meg Read who both had their own comments to add. Further to his original review, Ben was explicit in his disdain for Paul and his exploitation of those that wanted to get their foot in the door of videogames journalism.

“...it's symptomatic of a set of crooked editors who are using bright-eyed, hardworking writers to line their own pockets in exchange for exposure.”

You may be wondering how Ben’s review was even posted to Brash Games in the first place considering that it had some pretty damning remarks that would harm their reputation. Well, Ben was able to clear that up:

“Ah, yes, this part is interesting. There is absolutely no proofing or mediation. We are just left to upload reviews ourselves. So, the editor did not even see the review until he woke up in the morning.”

Olly Smith who publically posted a series of events on Twitter after he too left Brash Games, said: “As that review from earlier today shows, things can get published on Brash Games without being proofread.” Whilst Olly remained disappointed in his lack of credit in the work he created after leaving - which included a review of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Nintendo Switch - it was the feedback on his work, or lack thereof, that irked him most:

“One thing that bothered me the most was the lack of feedback and advice, which I noticed immediately after my first publication. I could never truly feel like I was learning the tricks of the trade.”

At the last check, Brash Games aren’t running any advertising on their website but both Ben and Olly were unsure on what else Paul Ryan does for income, mainly down to the radio silence between them both and Paul. It's likely that 'advertorials' that link to external sites such as those for gambling and casino are part of this. When asked how many writers may have been affected by this removal of credit, Olly made it clear this wasn’t an isolated case:

“I know of many, dozens, that have been affected. They've been tweeting me and sharing their stories. It's actually really crazy how many people have been affected by this.”

Meg Read finished writing for Brash Games over a year ago and has enjoyed positions at The Daily Star and The Daily Express. According to her, the changing of credit isn’t a new thing: “I only noticed myself last year when I went to use a review I'd done as a reference for something and my credits were removed. [I] only spoke out about it now because I didn't want the same thing to happen to anyone else!”

Meg went on to say that one of the reasons she left BG was due to the persistent emails about reviews and her struggle with mental health issues at the time:

“[I] ended up leaving because I couldn't deal with the constant emails. Emailed Paul to say I wouldn't be writing a certain review because I was busy with university and my mental health was bad at the time, he said it was fine and then a few days later, emailed to ask where my review was.”

Specifically, Ben’s reason for leaving and his subsequent review was based on discussion with fellow writers Olly and Meg, when he found out about the stripping of credit from reviewers and decided to call it a day. “I had learned of the site's "policy" with removing credits from @triforcemeg and @OllyWrites and from there I handed in my resignation.”

Reddit user /u/Bythmark believes that Brash Games should be removed as a review source from the /r/Games subreddit for this recent exposure. Games such as Yooka-Laylee and Yakuza 0 have featured Brash Games’ reviews as part of the ‘review round-ups’ that are featured on /r/Games. BG’s reviews, as well as other critic reviews, are selected after appearing on the relevant game’s OpenCritic page.

For websites to be listed on OpenCritic, a review aggregator that prefers to highlight writers’ own merit, rather than the site they write for - they have to meet one of the following criteria:

Over 42,500 social media followers on any single channel

Over 75,000 social media followers across any three channels combined

An Alexa ranking higher than 135,000

Consistently more than 400,000 unique monthly visits on SimilarWeb

Any other extremely convincing public evidence that your reviews are consumed by more than 50,000 people.

For Metacritic, where Brash Games are also featured with an attributed 1,200+ reviews, there aren’t distinct parameters on admittance for outlets. Websites are taken on a case-by-case basis, whilst established readership and a high engagement wouldn’t be seen as anything negatively impacting that admittance.

NeoGAF user ‘Mattenth’ who shares the same display picture as Matthew Enthoven, the OpenCritic Founder on Twitter, stated on NeoGAF’s forums that he is an investigator at OpenCritic and will be publishing a report on findings collated since March this coming Monday. Mattenth says that Brash Games asked to be removed from OpenCritic after being told that they would be investigated.

Mattenth goes on to say that he believes Ben’s review is “unprofessional... self-defeating... [and] immature...” and “goes against civility” as well as urging for the game community to be compassionate and forgiving towards Paul and Brash Games. In a later post, he makes it clear that Brash Games had requested to be removed from the Wayback Machine, a digital online archive, “to try [and] delete a lot of our [investigation] evidence.”

When asked about the comments from Mattenth, Ben said he would rather be confronted directly with such comments in future, and: “...if I'm immature and self-defeating, what is Paul Ryan?”

Furthermore, Meg who also believes that user Mattenth is indeed Matthew Enthoven, had this to say:

“...the owner [Mattenth] had no problems talking about me on NeoGAF, saying that BG had reinstated my credits on an article of "meaning" as a "gesture of goodwill" and seemed to side with BG even though they claim to be unbiased so I'm not sure how I feel about them now.”

OpenCritic’s own Twitter account reached out to Ben McCurry prior to the report being published and specifically asked to speak to Meg Read - I asked Meg what had been discussed and got this response: “OpenCritic messaged me asking whether I'd personally had any of my review scores changed and whether I'd witnessed anyone from BG talking about changing scores to mirror the ones on Metacritic.” If OpenCritic have reason to believe this is what has been happening with multiple reviews, it’s clear why they have undertaken investigations.

GameGrin writer, and someone featured on the aforementioned under-probation section of Brash Games, Thomas Hughes, felt that the lack of communication between the reviewers and the site’s owner was part of negativity.

“The whole website was run in a very odd fashion. There was no hub for writers to talk to one another, and absolutely no sense of community. This ultimately created a very weird experience in which my only contact with Brash Games was with the owner”

Both Ben and Olly echoed those comments: Ben stated that: “...there was absolutely no communication between writers on Brash. We were all completely isolated, only talking to Paul very rarely by email, usually just to take a new game.” In addition, Olly noted: “There is no communication between writers on the site unless you seek them out yourself. Emails between the editor and myself were purely based on what review I'd be writing next.”

Continuing, Meg explained exactly how the review process was, from offer of a game to submission: “You'd never get a personal email asking whether you'd like to review a certain game, instead it was a mass email with literally hundreds of review titles on. From this, you'd pick three in order of preference and if you were quick enough to beat other writers to the punch, you'd get the game you wanted.”

Despite their unfortunate interactions with Brash Games, the three former writers have both remained optimistic when considering future voluntary work. Olly was clear: “I will prioritise paid work a lot more in the future, but if a publication can provide clear and constructive feedback on how to improve as well as providing me with useful contacts and opportunities then I'm willing to give them a chance.” Ben added: “I was starting to think bigger anyway by pitching articles to bigger sites, but no, as long as a site or publication is reputable, I would absolutely work for free.”

Monday’s report from OpenCritic can’t come soon enough to shed some further light on what Brash Games have been doing in relation to review attribution and maybe more. We have reached out to Brash Games on both Twitter and via email to comment on this, but we're yet to hear a response. Regardless of the outcome, any attempt to remove credit from an original writer and pass this work off as someone else’s, should not be tolerated in an industry that in recent years has heavily suffered with credibility and professionalism.