Larian Studios Interview Pt. 1: Games Journalism is Broken - PAGE 1

Larian Studios is a studio known for its acclaimed Divinity RPG series, and is currently at work on the strategy RPG Dragon Commander. Its founder, developer, and businessman Swen Vincke is its leader, and one of the rare outspoken figures in the industry, particularly since going independent and starting up his own blog recently.

It's there Vincke goes into great detail on a lot of gaming industry-related topics rarely discussed in the media or elsewhere, one of them being games journalism. Like many developers, he's not happy with the state of it. Funnily enough, neither are we, so we called him up to chat about it, and also the business side of the industry (covered in part two of this interview, coming soon).

Read on for what you should find a fascinating examination of the state of things and what can be done to improve it.

Talk about your experiences with press from the early days up until now.

Press was a lot more open in the early days of the industry; they were much more accessible. And in my view they were much more representative of their players in what they were writing than they are today.

People are much more vocal now and that vocality is translating to the press, which seems to be more free. But then you have a press which seems to be almost run by the advertising agency of a publisher. You can see a lot of examples of that in the reviews being posted; you can almost pick which ones where you say 'Well, I know where that influence came from', which is publisher organized, and then the ones where you say 'Well that guy actually played the game and is just writing what he's thinking about it'.

I feel like that's a misconception, though. Maybe you know things I don't, but, as I've usually understood it, the advertising and the public relations (PR) teams are generally very separate and have little or no influence over each other. We've never had that problem; it's never been brought up. I mean, we're not a massive site, but I think we're big enough we would've seen that by now, because we deal with a lot of big publishers.

More often it's an issue where the writer isn't as critical as they should be, but it's more down to them and PR. It doesn't even have to be a spoken thing, they just don't want to upset PR for whatever reason.

In general it's not that outspoken. Sometimes it is; I've seen examples of it. But it's probably not the norm. Although, and I'm not going to mention the magazine (it's a fairly big one), not sooner than I'd just done an interview with somebody [recently] was the advertising manager talking with us on the phone a couple of hours later about how many pages we'd wanted to buy, etc. So it does happen like that.

Public relations is all about creating the perception around a game, which does cause problems. You see situations where the guys going to review a game are invited to go to Venice, and they're going to spend a half hour with the game and a week in Venice in a five-star hotel. It's going to be extremely hard to be extremely negative about it.

I've seen a PR manager in action for one of my games make a 79 an 81. And it cost him a lot of money; it cost him full page ads over multiple titles, but he managed to, and it had a big impact on the sales of the game.

Scoring is an issue in itself. As an editor, personally, I hate scoring. For awhile we didn't score our games; we brought it in eventually. I understand the need of it, and why it's useful, but it causes so many problems, with readers and PR. Idealistically I would like to eliminate scoring but that's not happening.

It's insane it can have such an impact. I was comparing numbers for Divinity II: The Dragon Knight Saga and Dragon Age II, because it had the same Metacritic rating (82). I went to look at the user scores for both games, and Dragon Age II had 73% user score on GameSpot, 70 on Amazon, and 42 on Metacritic, over thousands of votes. In our case it was much higher; our Metacritic fits more with our user score: 85 on GameSpot, 84 on Metacritic, 90 on Amazon. I know it's because it's purely PR machine work.

And if you look at the trends you see the initial Dragon Age II reviews were very high, and as you go over time...

Yeah, that's managing from the PR end. They know certain publications are guaranteed or pretty much guaranteed to give the game a very high score, so they give them early review copies.

It's creating a very distorted view toward your players who typically only have a budget for buying a couple of games over a year. Say you have a bad RPG that's getting initial 85 or 90 Metacritic rating, and people buy it and say 'I don't like RPGs'. You've basically done a disservice to the entire RPG developing and publishing community.