Eidos And Censorship

A lot of people place stock in game reviews. Whether we end up basing a purchasing decision on the words or rating attached to a game by a particular review source is largely immaterial, many of us will still factor it in. The game review – good or bad – becomes a part of the process. So, you can imagine that we’d all like to get our hands on those reviews in a timely manner and with an opinion that’s solely the thoughts of the person reviewing it, free from bias and Orwellian mind control. It would seem however, that Eidos Interactive (the publisher behind of Age of Conan, Hitman and Tomb Raider) has a different concept of game reviews and how they should be crafted. In what can plainly be seen (at Eidos’ own admission) as an attempt to prevent unfavorable reviews of Tomb Raider: Underworld making it online before it has had a chance to sell a bunch of copies, the company has given a PR firm the job of convincing review sites to hold off publishing reviews if the scores are below a certain threshold. The whole debacle originally came to light thanks to a UK journalist posting on twitter to say he received a call from Eidos asking him to hold off publishing a review of Tomb Raider if the score would be below 8.0 until the title had been on sale for three days. ( www.atomicmpc.com.au )

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