Scumbaggery in the Gaming Meedja

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VG Chartz uncloak evil.

 

Unlike some of VGChartz’ other contributors, Nick actually had a proper signed contract with VGChartz, and Nick pointed out that, per the terms of the contract, Brett couldn’t make changes to the contract without both he and Nick approving it. Clearly, Nick hadn’t approved this change in payment terms.

 

Brett responded the following day, opening with the line “Listen I don’t want to get nasty,” then he gets nasty. He claimed Nick had failed to reach the unshared, arbitrary number of posts he’d expected from the trip to PAX, that he’d commissioned the Mario 3 video and so the pageviews were his anyway, and he could cancel Nick’s contract any time he wanted to. He also mentioned that he’d later sent Nick to BlizzCon and had been out of pocket for that as well. Apparently Brett was mortified to discover that sending people to conventions costs money.

 

...Well that is just pickles on parade, isn't it.

 

G4, GamePro, etc get caught being silly.

 

Recently G4TV.com, GamePro, and VGChartz GamrFeed were caught in the act of massaging Reddit to get their content to the front of the site’s gaming category. How did they do this? Quite simple, really - they each hired someone specifically to set up a bunch of sockpuppet accounts to provide links to their respective news posts and then upvote them all a bunch of times. Exciting!

 

The same GamePro that covered this story about Metacritic manipulation.

 

Reddit user GatoFiasco became suspicious of the top User Review for Dragon Age II on Metacritic yesterday when it seemed to, in his words, "read almost like a press release" rather than an honest opinion. Following up on his intuition, he investigated the reviewer in question -- one "Avanost" -- and discovered via his social media footprint that he appeared to be an engineer from BioWare named Chris Hoban.

 

Oh dear.