Aigaion wrote: Esquire wrote: Influencers are easier to lean on.



But seeing so many people the gaming community doing a complete 360 in their views about traditional gaming media just so they can feel self righteous on Reddit is hilarious.



This.



Gaming media is atrocious, finding an actually good and honest source of information is like digging through dirt. Reviews are just another form of advertisement, payed off and bias. Game developers obviously invest a lot of money in internet celebrities, streamers and gaming media sites to play their games and give them good reviews.



I agree with Bethesda on this. Reviewer copies be damned.

What? That doesn't even make sense. if that was Bethesdas actual worry then all Bethesda has to do is not engage in that behavior and let people give their honest opinions, your arguement doesn't make any sense. Further still, just because some, even a majority of, outlets are untrustworthy does not make it a good thing that review copies are denied. Even the ones that are fairly untrustworthy (ie IGN) still post a lot of legitimate and relevant information about the game that can be filtered through their insistance on talking about everything as if it's amazing, especially with so many other sources to cross-reference and make sure it's accurate, and *trustowrthy* reviwers are also being denied access.This will also wreck the quality of reviews, even from honest reviewers, as they have to rush to get their review out when people will still read/watch it.Agreeing with this decision is cutting off your nose to spite your face. It only helps 1 entity and that's Bethesda, it's bad for dishonest reviewers, it's bad for honest reviewers, and it's bad for consumers. In fact it probably hurts the dishonest reviewers and "influencers" the least, because they are the ones who can most easily play fast and loose with information and the quality of their review and so get their reviews out before everybody else, while the honest ones who really take their time will actually want to be accurate and so will need to spend more time on it, decreasing the relevance of the review when it releases and thus hurting their wallets.There are plenty of trustworth reviewers. Total biscuit (though technically they're impressions not reviews,) AGC, Jim Sterling, Kinda Funny, Super Bunny Hop, ect. Even IGN is reasonably good when they aren't talking about games from big publishers, there is no ad money in cozying up to whatever random indie studio.Ultimately it's not just denying people reviewers opinions, it's denying people any information that Bethesda hasn't carefully selected. If Bethesda starts releasing full game playthroughs 2 days before launch so everyone can see hours of unedited gameplay and how all the sytems work then I'll reverse my position, but until then this is a horrendusly anti-consumer practice that only makes things worse for everyone, except Bethesda.EDIT: And of course there are a couple hundred people defending this position based on similarly ****y arguments (while of course ignoring the counter points about how this is bad for everyone.) This is why I have 0 faith in democracy (but still wouldn't get rid of it because I actually understand the concept of cutting off my nose to spite my face, or worse, cutting off my nose because some celerbty told me to even though they don't have a reason that stands up to even casual scrutiny.)