Speaking to GameDaily, IGN Xbox 360 editor Hilary Goldstein has given a frank interview about how he secured the exclusive on GTA IV and his reaction to a Variety article that came out and called the piece unethical.
There’s a lot of stuff over there, so it’s best the read the whole thing. Essentially, the early review was signed in exchange for a string of header features leading into the piece over a week.
Goldstein does say that “it’s something that Rockstar has never allowed before,” and we’re unsure about that if he means Rockstar’s never done an exclusive review on one of its games before.
He also says that “that entire week was all GTA tops on IGN.com, which was something we’d never done before.” Again, we’re not going to call him out, but is that actually correct?
Whatever. It’s an interesting read, and it’s about time someone was honest about this process, because this happens with every major game ever released on any platform and it’s the same for every territory, so we find the whole wide-eyed “IS THIS RIGHT?” thing more than a little naive, to be frank.
Securing exclusives of this nature is what part of what makes a good editor a good editor, period. The bottom line about editing commercial publications is traffic, and if you think it’s about anything else you’ve clearly never had to make money from a high profile consumer games site or magazine.
Read what Hilary has to say and make your own mind up.
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