A couple of members of Telltale Games’ staff have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar – Metacritic’s user review section. Why does Telltale, the developer behind the Lego series of games, need to cheat with game rankings? Surely I wasn’t the only one who thoroughly enjoyed at least one of their games centering around turning movie franchises into video games with that patented Lego twist. Maybe they weren’t so sure about their newest game (which is actually not Lego themed), Jurassic Park. They had it in the bag! Just having the name Jurassic Park guarantees at least some sales, right?
Apparently it wasn’t enough, as two members of the development team have been outed for writing beaming reviews with perfect scores on Metacritic (posing as consumers). Telltale failed to keep their employees “muzzled” on this one and allowed them to just post freely on the internet like any common video game consumer.
To its credit, company representatives did add that “it is being communicated internally that anyone who posts in an industry forum will acknowledge that they are a Telltale employee. In this instance, two people who were proud of the game they worked on, posted positively on Metacritic under recognizable online forum and XBLA account names.”
It’s true that they posted their names, which were researched on Google, but only after readers started to notice that something was fishy. Gamers made use of professional networking site LinkedIn to determine that these “reviewers” were employees with Telltale. The duo are not veteran employees of the studio.
This is obviously a big no no in the eyes of the gaming public. Most readers researching whether or not a game is good are not going to have time to Google the reviewers’ names to verify whether they are tied to the product or not. Maybe they should, though, since this is not the first time this has happened on Metacritic.
[Source: GameSpot UK]
[Image via GameSpot.]
