Barrington Harvey is Eidos’ chosen PR firm in the UK and has drawn their videogaming client under fire for some rather ill-advised ‘requests’ to reviewers.
While an embargo for reviews is a standard affair, asking for those that score below an 8 to stay silent for a little while longer certainly doesn’t sit well. Someone’s been naughty.
The game that’s caused all the ruckus is Tomb Raider: Underworld as a message went out to Gamespot UK’s Guy Cocker (snigger), who then posted on his Twitter that Eidos had asked ”if you’re planning on reviewing Tomb Raider Underworld at less than an 8.0, we need you to hold your review till Monday.”
Why the gamble with such a PR blunderbuss? Well Barrington Harvey weren’t shy to admit it was ”trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high”. Oh dear.
The rep speaking on their behalf put their foot in more of it as they continued, saying the ”brand manager in the US that’s handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don’t put people off buying the game, basically.” You work for PR? Really?
You may remember the whole furore a while back concerning Eidos, Gamespot and little game called Kane & Lynch. Whether Eidos had anything to do with the dismissal of a journalist is ultimately irrelevant as the damage had already been done by the end.
”Barrington Harvey is not in the position of telling reviewers what they can and cannot say. We love Tomb Raider and believe it merits a score of at least 8/10, but if someone disagrees that’s entirely their prerogative. No problem at all. Seriously: no problem,” says Simon Byron, a director at Barrington Harvey.
See below for the full statement from PR firm Barrington Harvey.
Barrington Harvey is not in the position of telling reviewers what they can and cannot say. We love Tomb Raider and believe it merits a score of at least 8/10, but if someone disagrees that’s entirely their prerogative. No problem at all. Seriously: no problem.
Our original NDA stated that in order to receive an advance copy of the game, reviewers agreed not to post reviews ahead of 5:00pm, Wednesday 19th November 2008. Nothing else. No further obligations whatsoever.
As you can clearly see from the scores posted so far, Barrington Harvey has no issue with scores of below eight out of 10 being posted online. The Eurogamer review in questions caused “problems” in so much as it originally contained a couple of minor factual inaccuracies which, to its credit, the site has quickly rectified and addressed (without, quite rightly, changing the context of the review).
Any site, be it Gamespot or whoever, is entirely within their rights to post whatever score they want and no-one is under any sort of obligation to delay any review.
As an ex-journalist myself, I firmly believe in editorial integrity and the right to express an individual opinion. As an agency, we never - ever - make demands of the press in terms of awarding scores; at the end of the day, they are free to score as they wish.
Barrington Harvey has been working hard to ensure the launch scores of Tomb Raider Underworld are in line with our internal review predictions over the launch weekend - but to suggest that we can in some way “silence” reviews of the game is slightly overstating our influence.
Source: VG247
