It’s obvious when embargoes are lifted in the game industry, as every videogame site under the sun suddenly posts the same derivative article at approximately the same time. Embargoes are a scourge, a powerplay by the P.R. department handling a videogame, which serves no positive purpose for anyone involved. It dillutes the media for gaming sites and compresses the exposure of a game into a single day.

I mean, how many BioShock 2 previews do we need posted on a single day? You’d think a publisher would want the exposure spread out over time, keeping the brand in your head up till the day of release, but no. P.R. hacks think it best that previews all hit on the same day. Worse, the various sites are more than willing to play along, willingly giving up whatever power they may have had.

Let’s take a gander at which sites played the embargo game today, offering up essentially the same content as everyone else:

Wired: First Look: BioShock 2 Takes Bold Trip to Rapture

Loot Ninja:  Eyes-On Preview: BioShock 2

CVG: BioShock: Behind the Scenes

Worthplaying: Preview – BioShock 2

Gamespy: Thrills, Drills, and Blood Spills in Rapture

ShackNews: BioShock 2 Impressions: Seeing and Dreaming

Kotaku: BioShock 2 Impressions: Spoilers? What Spoilers?

Destructoid: Preview: BioShock 2

G4TV: BioShock 2 First Impressions

Escapist Magazine: BioShock 2 Preview

Joystiq: Joystiq Impressions: BioShock 2

Good work, boys.

Last Friday, IGN posted their “exclusive” review of Grand Theft Auto 4, this year’s critic-proof game. The posting of the review highlighted a bizarre practice in game media of adhering to publisher-imposed embargoes, wherein a publisher tells you a review cannot go up until a specific day. One of the many troubling aspects of this practice is that every first-tier site or magazine had access to GTA IV early so as to get their reviews prepared prior to GTA’s launch. However, IGN was given special permission to run their review two days before everyone else.
You’d think that once IGN posted their review that every other wesbite would soon follow suit, no longer shackled by the demands of Take 2, GTA’s publisher. That didn’t happen. Sites still played the Embargo Game and stuck to their allocated dates for fear of reprisal.
I will have an article ready to go this week that explores this matter in more detail. As someone who has been working in this industry for 15 years as a writer, I’ve seen a lot of nonsense that I’ll be sharing. In the meantime, Ben Fritz of Variety is tackling the issue of IGN and GTA 4.Worth a read.

Perhaps I was wrong about one thing. Even though IGN ran its review yesterday, nobody else seems to have one up. Not even IGN’s biggest competitors GameSpot and 1UP. Apparently they’re all waiting on an embargo that Kotaku says is tomorrow (Sunday) morning. That truly blows my mind. In my world, if I had a story or review ready to go and was waiting on an embargo, the minute somebody else ran the same review or story, I would run mine. If a publisher or studio or whatever gave me a later embargo, tough sh*t.