7 Times You Were Right To Worry About Video Games

Welcome to the sausage factory, let's see how these pig tubes get made.

So in case you've been living under a digitized, micro-transaction DLC rock, you'll know that we here at WhatCulture review games from time to time, and as part of this process we reach out to publishers in order to request codes, or are approached by PR firms representing them in order to arrange coverage.

What follows is a ream of NDAs, corporate spiel, and an increasingly worrying amount of "you can't talk about X in your review" which is just plain odd.

However, something even worse than the ever tighter constraints publishers are placing on, you know, information designed to help the public decide how best to spend their money, is the increasing number of outlets that state reviews can only go live the day of the title's launch, or downright refuse to give out review copies.

And it's here that the good ship "worrywart" is sailing right into the mouth of Davy Jones' locker my friend, as when this happens, there's little to no hope that the game in question is going to be up to par, and your words of warning will arrive too late to do anything about it.

This move is a clear sign of zero faith in the end project by the publisher, either because it's rife with bugs or just made with about as much effort as an apathetic shrug. But rather than offer the piece up for fair criticism, they choose to scrape as many sales and pre-orders up as possible before the word of mouth becomes mostly consisting of "f**k off".