While other publications are busy jettisoning their unprofitable journalistic integrity as quickly as possible, Dan Hsu (of EGM) is back in the news, and this time he’s naming names. Apparently Ubisoft is unhappy with the treatment Assassin’s Creed received, and has banned EGM from future coverage of all their games. While they can’t actually prevent EGM from reporting on anything, they can stop inviting them to play preview builds, providing voluntary interviews, and of course sending them money to run advertisements. Additionally, Sony’s sports team (do they actually make anything?) and the Mortal Kombat team have similarly blacklisted EGM for negative coverage.

It’s unclear to me who this hurts more. Theoretically, could several large publishers band together to starve a gaming magazine of coverage and ad revenue, driving them out of business? Or is it more likely that Ubisoft will get the short end of the stick, losing out on cover stories for their biggest games?

My (completely uninformed) opinion is that EGM should treat this as an opportunity to step up in the investigative journalism area. Aside from upcoming Apple products, when does geek journalism uncover things the designers, developers, and publishers don’t want the public to know? However, the entire field is filled with young, naive, underpaid people perfectly willing to spout off all their company’s most closely-held secrets.

EGM’s been pretty good about being critical of what’s presented to them: their previews of Assassin’s Creed were rare in their restraint, and their foresight of the final game’s flaws. It seems to me that Ubisoft’s just given them free reign to step their critical coverage up to the next level.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.