 Hey everyone, before I get into today's video, I want to remind you to enter our giveaway for Paper Mario the Origami King. To enter, all you need to do is comment on this video, like this video, subscribe to the channel and hit that bell icon. You can do this on every single video released from now through the end of July and we'll announce the winner at the end of the month. All right, it is July 1st and unfortunately we get to start this month with some bad industry news that makes Sony and even Square Enix, who knows who else, not look that great when it handles reviews. Now, you guys know I don't really do a lot of game reviews at the channel. I am in the midst of contemplating doing impression videos where I'm not going to really call it a straight up review. I'm just going to play some games whether they're older or newer and just give my thoughts on it. But I feel it's different than a review because there's a lot of pressure on reviews and review scores and something happened with The Last of Us Part 2 at Polygon and who knows however many other outlets in regards to Sony that really irks me. So let's get into this story. This is posted on Polygon. As you see here, they put up a recent article talking about The Last of Us 2 has become a minefield. This is mostly about all the negative user scores and all that jazz. But if you scroll down a little bit, there's this interesting part. So it says, well, the vast majority of reviews have lavished The Last of Us Part 2, again, as a 94 overall on Metacritic, with all sorts of praise. A handful of outlets, Polygon included, have slightly more critical of that Blockbuster game or have been. According to Xan, I don't know if that's pronounced right, Vice's review prompted a Sony representative to reach out on behalf of Naughty Dog. They felt some of the conclusions I reached in my review were unfair and dismissed some meaningful changes or improvements. Xan said clarified the exchange wasn't confrontational, but it was nonetheless unusual as the site doesn't typically have big publishers asking in an official capacity why a review reads the way it does. Such things can happen, of course, though often from smaller developers or from publishers who have spotted a factual error in a piece that they want corrected. I was happy to unpack a bit of my reasoning, but received a much more personal or received a perfectly cordial message in response. Naughty Dog's PR team declined to comment on Polygon's inquiry in this exchange with Vice. So what you have here is Sony reaching out because they didn't like a review. They didn't like how a review was written. They didn't like how a review portrayed their game. They disagreed with the review. And what's becoming clear is that while this is unusual, Sony and Naughty Dog clearly were trying to skirt negative viewpoints of their game in the review process. And when you see such a strong reaction from all of the fans of the game giving all these negative reviews primarily because of the story, it leads you to wonder if the fans could have such a negative viewpoint of this. How can the people reviewing it just give all this stuff a pass and just still give out 9 out of 10s and 10 out of 10s to a game that clearly the fan base doesn't agree with. And a lot of the people who reviewed this game also played the last of us. So how can there be so many positive reviews? And this is why because there's a lot of pressure put on people for this. Now a while back when I used to run ZeldaInformer.com for some reason, I can't remember what the reasoning was, but we called out IGN. We called out IGN because it appeared anyways that a review or an article of a particular game had some wording and stuff changed due to links between the advertising and pressure put on by the publisher. So basically, they didn't like the way something was written. They came in and suggested changes and the changes were forced into the piece to keep the publisher happy. And this gets into a really sticky situation where people are worried, outlets in particular are worried about being blackballed or blacklisted by major companies because early access to games is one of the few things that keep things like IGN and GameSpot and other places really afloat. Yes, they have a lot of other popular podcasts and all that jazz, but the brux of it is what makes those places matter is this exclusive access to the games that even us YouTubers generally don't get. If we even do get review copies of the game, we might get it a few days early or we get it the day of launch. But a lot of the major publications, Polygon, IGN, get weeks often to spend with these games to create hype and coverage and pre-release content and all that. And it's really a backbone of the video game industry, but they can hold things against companies if they don't give reviews that necessarily favor what they feel should be an overall perfect video game. And The Last of Us Part 2 by Naughty Dog is successful and it's huge as the sales are. And also, by the way, it's also the number one returned video game. People don't talk about that much, but the number of returns or requested refunds on The Last of Us Part 2 is higher than any other first-party Sony game. I'm not sure what the final sales figures is when you consider returns into it, but the point is that it's a critical darling, but is it a critical darling not just because of some of the gameplay mechanics and stuff are great, but because there's pressure put on these outlets to keep the reviews favorable? Now, this is some evidence that Sony has been tampering a little bit. They didn't go so far as to tell them you need to change this or else. They let this person in particular explain themselves, but that is not the typical way this goes with some other companies. Let me explain, because as crappy as this is of Sony to do and Naughty Dog to do and just paints a horrible light because they weren't correcting any factual inaccuracies, they were basically saying we don't agree with your opinion, change it, and then they say, well, here's why I gave it, and then they stayed cordial and left it alone, probably because they wanted to avoid this whole controversy becoming public. Square Enix has been messing with stuff. We now have evidence of it happening back in 2012, kind of crazy. I found this on Reset Era, but it actually comes off Twitter. Let's get into this a little bit too. Gita Jackson here who put up the quote from Polygon or whatever on this stuff happening. Bella Chun-Li blah blah blah blah blah is a video game journalist, says now that we're calling this out because it was called out, you know, Sony was being called out for trying to tamper with a review. Square Enix did this in 2017 to me over a review of Final Fantasy 12. They tried to intimidate me into changing my score, accused me of lying and offered correct paragraphs to put in. I quit games writing for two years after that. It goes on to say a hilarious addendum is that I was given a dev unit console to play near Automata on about three months before release and I had to sign a super crazy NDA. For those who don't know, any time you have review units, whether it's hardware or software, you do have to agree to an NDA. Sometimes it's weird, you'll get the product before you've even agreed to the NDA. Nintendo used to do that where they set it up to media and the NDA would be included with the product, but you didn't even agree to it before you got the product. So it's kind of weird. Anyways, they gave that game a 10 and then they sent them a black box edition and assigned Yoko Terro print. Now the original name this person went by for writing has been revealed to some people who have verified this person's story is true and I can verify from basically my own experience dealing with review copies of games and other people I've talked to in the industry that work at particular outlets and video game developers. I'm not going to call anyone up by name. I don't want anyone getting in trouble that this practice actually happens quite often. There's been many times when someone has given a game a perfect score at a major outlet and when that happens they've been sent like perks I guess or little gifts from the company say thank you for giving us a perfect score which again that's an incentive laid in reason to give a game a perfect score. Though this writer is not saying they gave that perfect score expecting to get stuff but they thought it was weird that when they gave on your automata or whatever a perfect score they ended up getting the stuff it doesn't make any sense. So I think that we are just stuck in a world in the video game media that's coming out and there's a lot of other other controversies coming out from the industry but in regards to the actual coverage of games I feel like this has been the reason there's been such a rise over the last decade of youtubers like me and others becoming more trusted by video game fans over these traditional outlets because even though there's shady things that happen on YouTube there's very shady things that happen on YouTube and I'll touch on that in a moment it comes down to this practice of you know holding you know trying to force review scores to be better because guess what PR companies HR companies they get bonuses sometimes based on the metacritic score of games which is complete and utter nonsense that video game companies do this but they do and this is one reason why some people really hate metacritic because it's put all this unnecessary pressure on game reviewers and the game developers and HR companies or PR companies in general to to try to push for higher reviews from all these outlets that they privilege games to and sometimes you don't end up with the true opinion of the writer you end up with a censored version of what that writer had to say and potentially altered review scores to satiate these publishers and developers so it sucks and here we have evidence of sony doing it being called out attempting to do it anyways and it doesn't sound like it was successful and they backed off but sony attempted to get involved with reviews of last of us part two at least at two outlets vice and polygon we don't know about other outlets they might have tried to do this at and obviously now we have square enix that did this in 2017 with final fantasy 12 which was stupid because i think it was just the hd remaster at that point i don't really know what they were thinking but they got a new square enix tried to force more positive reviews there and review changes and this has happened we know this has happened we've we've heard stories like this several times over the years and i don't want to say that this is what happens a majority of the time but it does happen now personally in my history of getting review copies of games mostly dealing with nintendo um and a copy of epic mickey the original epic mickey i got that review copy i personally never had to deal with any of it i've never had nintendo contact me to try to change review scores i do send the reviews oftentimes uh to my representative at goal and harris and stuff like that when i used to write them and uh you know they would they would sometimes um give some feedback uh but they would never say you need to change your review or we don't you know whatever nintendo wants you to it was usually just that person's personal opinion and if they disagreed with me but they would never ask me to make changes or anything i don't know it's it's a very interesting conundrum we find ourselves in as a video game industry and um you know youtubers are not innocent either uh youtubers fight for perks like game like like getting games early uh so they can do day one live streams and all that jazz uh we get sponsored often by some of these companies that feels like they're often is not a disconnect in uh ad revenue versus youtube revenue as an example if i nintendo contacts me and they want to sponsor some videos to advertise paper mario uh the origami king which is being advertised anyways with my giveaway but if they they want to use hey we want you to throw a commercial in your video or talk about the game or whatever we'll give you the game early so you can do your own footage okay well there's not a disconnect between that and what i do at the channel because i'm a nintendo youtuber i'm a video game youtuber i cover video game stuff as awesome as that sponsorship is it's going to taint anything i say about paper mario which in my opinion means i can't review that game so you can look at it as if ign has ads on it for the last of this part two should they be really making a review for last of this part two when they're being paid by the people um for the ad space i know there's a bigger disconnect of those websites between the ad sales company and the writing you know i've had some some conversations with upper management at ign to see how things are separated so i'm not going to accuse them of this but with youtubers there's rarely any separation between who advertises on our channel and us as content creators it's all the same thing we often run these channels alone most of us don't have pr teams uh so yeah it's it's really sticky with youtubers as well so as much as you guys might trust us if you start to see a lot of sponsored videos or you see ads uh you have to start to wonder and no by the way my giveaways are not generally sponsored i don't think i've had a sponsor to give away in a long time maybe one ever um i pay for everything on a pocket so i don't know it's just a crazy situation to me that we're dealing with in this industry and obviously uh sony stop it please all right the game was going to sell well anyways and be a critical darling regardless because people love last of us just stop it stop it you had no reason to contact any reviewers that you disagreed with you uh you know square enix if it's really true you're trying to change review scores now stop it the games you release are generally really good anyways autopad traveler it was fantastic final fantasy 15 was fantastic all the Tomb Raider games that were fantastic like seriously stop it you don't need to do this that's the stupid thing you don't need to do this i know you're doing it because bonuses and everything are based on metacritic stop giving a crap about metacritic bonuses should be based on game sales game sales okay game crosses four million five million six million ten million in sales everyone gets a bonus that's how it should work sales actual money coming into the company should determine bonuses not review scores or metacritic ratings or user scores like it's so stupid it's so stupid so that's my my two cents on this i'm sorry this is still a thing happening in the industry it's always going to happen because money's involved um but yeah that's kind of my two cents shame on you sony shame on you naughty dog shame on you square enix and any other company that's practicing this but hasn't been called out yet because i'm sure more and more stories are going to come out um about this practice becoming common so thank you guys so much for tuning in i am the tenor opal jams from nintendo prime be sure to go get a copy of paper mario origami king if you're interested or try to win our giveaway again comment like subscribe and uh hit the bell icon all right it's all i got for you guys for now um i have a couple of the stories we might get to today uh but for now that's what i got catch you guys in the next video