Hi! Kieron here, Editor-in-Chief of covergeek!
If you’ve clicked through to this page, you’re probably interested in knowing what our policies are on publishing reviews here at the site and how we view our responsibilities both to the folks who read them, and the folks who make them possible.
I do want to get a little bit into the weeds with this one, so let’s first get the hard and fast policy stuff out of the way:
Here at covergeek, we will never ever take any form of reward or renumeration in exchange for positive or otherwise influenced coverage.
There, we said it.
Now, there’s some nuance to this that I’d love to talk about. First of all, a “free” pre-release copy of a game, piece of hardware, interesting collectible thing is not what we would consider reward or renumeration – these are the things that are required to effectively bring you relevant, timely and useful coverage. When we accept any of these, it is done with the understanding of all parties that we will fairly evaluate said work or product, for better or for worse, and deliver that insight to our audience in whatsoever form we deem appropriate.
In the vast majority of instances, when we accept early access to something in order to review it, that early access will come with embargo restrictions imposed by the developer/publisher/vendor, and often a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) of some kind. These are typically created in good faith, to keep the playing field level for editorial teams and content creators everywhere, to preserve surprises for eager players and fans, that sort of thing. An embargo will usually let us know exactly when the earliest is we can publish a scored review, and it’ll often ask us not to talk about certain, specific aspects of a game that would be considered spoilers, and we think that’s fine!
Should a review offer come with embargo restrictions that we believe are unfair, be it the timing of an embargo that might make it hard for our audience to make an effective purchase decision, something that might prevent us from delivering an honest opinion, or really anything that would require us to let our standards of integrity slip in order to get access to a game or product – we will enthusiastically push back. If we can’t come to an understanding, we will politely decline the opportunity. Thankfully, I’ve never personally been put in that position in 10+ years of doing this, but I feel it’s important to establish where that line is for us, here.
In a similar vein, we may occasionally be invited to attend events where we can preview or otherwise celebrate a game, movie, gadget, or product of some kind. These will often come with similar embargo restrictions, on similarly reasonable grounds, and our stance remains the same. Should a third party choose to cover flights, accommodation or any other amenities for the purpose of us attending an event, this will always be disclosed, and we will continue to observe the same responsibility to our audience and our integrity as with any other coverage.
And that’s really the crucial thing in establishing and maintaining trust between us and you, our audience. Disclosure. Every time we receive a game, a piece of tech, an invite, an ad sponsorship or anything else that we believe is important to delivering fun, informative and sustainable coverage, we’ll let you know – and we’ll point you right back to this page as a reminder of our commitment to that integrity.
Hopefully that all makes sense and seems as reasonable to you as it does to me. If you have any questions about any of this, I’ll gladly answer them.
In addition, let’s quickly talk about review scores.
I’ve never been a big fan of them. I absolutely understand why folks would find scores useful, especially when they can be easily aggregated into an obvious metric for whether something is worth your time and money, and it’s not like I don’t look to them myself for the same reason.
But for those of us actually writing and filming reviews, what we really want is for you to read or watch what we have to say, right? Review scores don’t appropriately capture the nuance of the text, and I know I speak for just about all of my peers when I say pouring my thoughts out onto the page or screen and then having to self-quantify that into a hard number can be painful.
Still, we want to respect the ease of use and confidence that a review score might bring our audience, and so after a lot of deliberation we’ve landed on using a classic star rating system.
I believe this offers the best balance of quantifiable, aggregatable metric and authority, giving you a measure that is consistent but also leaves room for application of the review text. A 6/10 game is assumed equal to all other 6/10 games, but three stars could mean more to one game than another. At least, that’s what makes sense to me.
For now, I’m going to run with the option for including half stars, which will technically gives us access to that full 10-point spectrum, which is honestly more important to being represented on sites like Metacritic and OpenCritic than anything else. I’m always open to hearing feedback and reevaluating this as often as needed, though, whether that’s from our audience or anyone who helps contribute to covergeek!
Again, feel free to get in touch with any questions or feedback you might have around this stuff.
Thanks for taking the time to read all this over, and thanks for visiting covergeek!
Kieron | Editor-in-Chief