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Recent Assassin's Creed Amazon leak was purposefully fake to show the rampant amateurism in videogames journalism
- Thread starter Lelouch0612
- Start date
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to dislike the gaming press, but idk if hating on them for just reporting on a rumor is one of them
Yeah, this
Hah! See I told you every video game journalist was a hack fraud! This proves it!!
In all seriousness though I am amused how much this plays into the "European Game Journalist" stereotype Jeff Gerstmann/Giant Bomb used to joke about for years.
In all seriousness though I am amused how much this plays into the "European Game Journalist" stereotype Jeff Gerstmann/Giant Bomb used to joke about for years.
are you suggesting that a youtuber might create a "social experiment" to drum up outrage to increase their following with a specific demographic?
There's also, for the most part, no kind of actual journalistic training for these outlets. Most of the people running these stories didn't get a journalism degree, so they didn't have things like "following sources" beat into their head.
It's enthusiast press. I mean it would be nice if all of them were Jason Schreier or Patrick Klepek, but this industry doesn't pay well enough to get a lot of quality journalists.
So this is what we're stuck with.
Ah fair enough. A quick Google got me GamesRadar and Metro (although I don't know how reputable I'd consider the latter for gaming news specifically anyway) but not the others.
Primarily, and at the heart of the movement, yes. Not gonna deny that.
I remember Gamesradar peddling 4-chan nonsense about Elden Ring ("Great Rune" anyone?) a while back too, without citing sources. SMH.
This is quite the leap. I'm a native French speaker and I see nothing in the tweets indicating anything like that.
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I don't think, he's French and two of the biggest French outlets reported on the news.
His goal was more to discole these kind of bad practices while giving examples of small outlets that do a good journalism work (like XboxSquad).
One of the byproducts of gamergate that upset even the targets of that shit was how it would lead to less legit criticism of games press because it would get lumped in with this shit. And look what you are doing...
I don't really think it's unreasonable to ask that individuals working in gaming journalism spend more than 30 seconds looking at and questioning the things they plan to report on.
I remember my "Sony removed Death Stranding's exclusive status off the official PlayStation site" thread and subsequent 300 word PROOF™ as to why the game was coming to PC being lauded by console warriors across the internet and sourced in a bunch of articles. From high-profile outlets like GameSpot and IGN no less.
I also sometimes see some articles made from the words of those 'insiders' in the Nintendo Direct Speculation Thread although these are from more bush-league outlets.
Era really is a hotspot huh.
I also sometimes see some articles made from the words of those 'insiders' in the Nintendo Direct Speculation Thread although these are from more bush-league outlets.
Era really is a hotspot huh.
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My big issue here is not being wrong (it can happen from times to times) but 0 sourcing from various outlets is really bad.
Is it weird that the open-world bit is what caused me to call bullshit and not the Norse stuff
Still seems crazy that From are developing an open-world, we landed in the best timelines fellas
There is valid criticism to be hard here, but this isn't a constructive or productive manner of going about it. This is some lame "gotcha", over something trivial, with a message that will likely resonate in some awful ways.
There is absolutely nothing about this that has any correlation with gamergate, and it's disingenous to suggest that criticism of clickbait journalism should be shunned to avoid potential overlap with bigots.
EDIT: I didn't realise you'd already responded to the same thing above.
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It is productive imo.
- It makes readers more careful when reading information
- It gave a lot of exposition to a small indie outlet that did a good journalism work
- It makes outlets more careful (JV.com deleted their article so the message was received), especially about sourcing their article.
Yeah, that's true. I was a news manager for IGN Italy, GameSoul (Gamestop private blog in Italy), VideoGamer Italy and GamesVillage. All the newser in Italy (and rest of the world, I suppose) get the news from ResetEra (previously NeoGAF), AllGamesDelta, Reddit and 4chan. That's it.
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Yes but the listing never existed. It was a fake and some outlets reported on it as if the listing appeared on Amazon. Some of them even used Amazon as a source, whereas most of them didn't even have a source.
Really don't agree. All they had to do was provide their sources or do the bare minimum of checking* (reverse google image search, actually going to Amazon to see if the entry existed, etc.). Exposing the ultra-sloppy work of those sites is productive enough. They'll hopefully think twice about compulsively sharing clickbait in the future.
* Which is what XboxSquad did and they aren't some big site.
Hell I expect more from Era forum posts tbh xD
Yup
The retail listing was fake, that's the entire point. Those sites didn't even look on Amazon itself to see if the listing was real. The pic was fabricated.
Perhaps, but i'd argue it being handled in this manner is quite irresponsible. If this was done in good faith, then so be it.
There's one but people are too afraid to do it: kill all social media. Facebook, Twitter, IG, Snap, Tumblr, you name it. Most if not all of those juggernauts have repeatedly shown us they 1) gladly sell your private data to the highest bidders and 2) don't have a problem acting as a vessel for propaganda. I could rant all day long about how social media is the #1 public enemy of our current social hivemind. It's unregulated and very dangerous.
10 years ago FB and social media started really encroaching into our lives. Even the damn POTUS uses Twitter as a loudspeaker to spill disinformation. Yet everything seems fine according to politicans. Also, GAFAs are now actually more powerful than governments, go figure. All that to say the current wave of yellow journalism is mostly due to the nature of our daily lives, i.e. ain't got time to do a proper job and must run any stories for the clicks.
What do you mean now what? Sounds like mission accomplished to me.
🧐 Aah I see. That is pretty shoddy, but not surprising unfortunately. It's all about being first to get the clicks. Accuracy and authenticity take a back seat.
There's always a group of people thinking this sort of stuff matters. It doesn't. Nobody is going to remember this thing being done to own the journalists. I already forgot about it and I'm in the thread typing about it right now.
People really need something better to do with their time. Maybe they should try something productive.
People really need something better to do with their time. Maybe they should try something productive.
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Providing reliable information doesn't matter ? I don't get your point.
I don't know if I blame them though since retailer leaks are not uncommon and the news goes along with previous info on AC Ragnarok. Now, if it was something out of the blue like Mass Effect 5, then I'd be more critical of the news outlet
People will read a story that says "turns out it was fake" and then move on with their lives. Literally nobody gives a damn.
The only thing this does is make people more likely to doubt good journalists. People aren't going to differentiate between who reported on this and who didn't, they're just going to go "You can't trust these guys,they don't know wtf they're talking about" and lump Jason (who's rarely ever, ever wrong) into the same boat as the dorks who thought reporting on this was smart.
Someone will even say it's different and Jason (or another person who's almost never wrong) didn't report on this, but it won't matter. Those people will deflect and still say you can't trust the news media.
People following the super small sites will continue to 'cause they just want the hype, this won't affect them at all.
Someone will even say it's different and Jason (or another person who's almost never wrong) didn't report on this, but it won't matter. Those people will deflect and still say you can't trust the news media.
People following the super small sites will continue to 'cause they just want the hype, this won't affect them at all.
Maybe those websites, editors, and journalists will remember and think to take a little more time to source their stories, or research what they report. Positive change being somewhat ineffective with immediate results does not mean we should just not try, or not expect improvement.
Seems pretty productive to me. Things only 'improve' if their mistakes are highlighted. This is highlighting those mistakes - even if it does kind of come across as a sting operation. It probably costs so much money and time for employees who have to manage these sorts of 'rumors' and 'speculation' stories that gets perpetuated by careless games journalism. If said places are now going to take that extra moment to verify things, it just improves the situation for everyone. Everything is gained, nothing is lost. Especially since it seems nobody is going to lose their job over this.
While I completely understand where you're coming from when you say it "will resonate in awful ways...." Video game journalism isn't some protected class that we can't legitimately criticize when they make mistakes out of fear of shitty gamers who will always leverage any and everything to curb industry progressiveness no matter what. They'll do that regardless.
Yep. As I said, it seems like nobody will lose their job over this, and the story seemed pretty innocent to begin with. An Ass Creed game that we all know Ubisoft pumps out anyway. Imagine if the story was something more controversial, with more serious implications - and some of the media ran with it without verification or fact checking - that could have been dangerous. Better for lessons learned all around on something a bit innocent then for this not to happen and be a big problem for a bigger story down the road.
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Generalizing the results of this strange experiment to reach this conclusion is pretty shitty when we have actual good journalists posting on these boards and even in this thread. I agree there are problems - mostly what gets actually labelled as journalism - but there are really hardworking people putting out very good work at Kotaku, Eurogamer, Waypoint and Ars Technica, just to name a few, that don't deserve to get lumped in with this.
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On the old forum. One of my posts was used as a source because of a bug in Grand Theft Auto V. Several media outlets used it for reporting. Even the Escapist reported on it.
