Broad swaths of the video-game media depend on the mantra “all versions are created equal” in order to cover the insanely tight schedule of major releases every holiday season. Sites like GameSpot, with the requisite manpower and budget, can choose to review a game across all three primary platforms, but other enthusiast websites and magazines may only have time for one version of a game. What happens if the conventional wisdom fails and one version of a game is markedly different from the others?
What raised this question is Jim Sterling's Call of Duty: Black Ops review published on Destructoid. Unable to get a copy of the console version of the game before deadline, Sterling reviewed the PC version of the title — and found the multiplayer broken and pretty much unplayable.
Being unable to get quick and stable matches is obviously a huge problem for the Call of Duty franchise, which has in large part been defined by its dominating command of the multiplayer shooter mindshare. Much to the ire of some readers, Sterling therefore wound up giving Black Ops a 6/10, even though he fairly noted in his review that had the multiplayer actually functioned properly he might have scored the game an 8 or a 9.
When I first saw the score, I was shocked. Then I read the basis for it, and what occurred to me was that it sounded like Sterling had reviewed a bad port of Black Ops, not the "actual game." I hadn’t read anything about the Xbox 360 or PS3 versions having the same sorts of online problems, which meant had he played a console version of the game, his readers would have received the total-product review they ostensibly would want. Had they been cheated out of the review they had expected to find on their favorite video-game website, on account of Sterling having played the PC version?
I made this suggestion ineloquently to some video-game journalists and was roundly told that Sterling had done nothing wrong, that he had reviewed the product he was given, and that it wasn’t incumbent upon Sterling to seek out the "best version" of Black Ops in order to give it a better score.
At this point it became clear to me just how ineloquent I’d been. My concern was never about how high a score Black Ops received but rather whether evaluating only a portion of a game really counted as "reviewing" it.
If the myth of equanimity between different platforms’ versions of the same game is shattered, should this affect which version the press selects in order to write reviews? Perhaps they should only review games on PC when they are decidedly “PC games” — that is, they're only out for PC, like Starcraft 2. If they have a choice, shouldn't they review the version that is likely to directly serve the most readers — in other words, a console version?
There’s also the question of what the primary development platform for a title is. The Xbox 360 purportedly fills that role for a lot of third-party developers, so the 360 version of a cross-platform title may effectively be the “native” version by which to judge all the rest.
The danger in this kind of thinking, however, is that it puts even more power into the hands of publishers to try and influence reviews. If the only place you can play the Xbox 360 version of Black Ops early enough to publish a same-day review is at a special event in Ojai, California, and the 360 version is considered the “baseline” experience, journalists either have to accept Activision’s terms or try and negotiate like Game Informer and Joystiq did.
Not every outlet has that kind of influence, however, and not every journalist is willing to go through the song and dance of negotiation just to review a game early.
For the record, this discussion should not be considered part of the “PC gaming is dying” nonsense. This is also not a complaint about which platform holds development primacy. Considering it became clear with Modern Warfare 2 that Activision considers PC versions of Call of Duty titles to essentially be console ports, one has to wonder if it’s worth reviewing the PC versions of these specific games anymore.
This is a problem to keep an eye on, for if it spreads to other franchises or becomes par for the course, video-game journalists ought to ask themselves some hard questions about how they handle reviews of multiplatform titles.
Dennis Scimeca is a freelance writer from Boston, MA. He has written for The Escapist and @Gamer magazine, is currently penning a feature for Gamasutra, and maintains a blog at punchingsnakes.com. This has been his first installment of "First Person," his new weekly column on Bitmob concerned with meta questions around the video-game industry and the journalism that covers it.