I’ve just been catching up on my pre-Christmas backlog of reading and listening matter and discovered this little gem on the last Penny Arcade podcast.
Apparently, before the launch of Tomb Raider Underworld, Eidos’ PR company decided to contact all UK press and ask them to not publish a review for three days after its launch if they intend to give it a score of less than 8/10 in an attempt to bump the game’s MetaCritic scores. Of course, it wasn’t long before word spread about — Gamespot UK’s Guy Cocker was the first to innocuously Twitter about it.
What’s more amusing is their obscure effort to cover it up. Or, rather, not. When contacted videogaming247, their PR company responded
We’re trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos … we’re trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and 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.
Uh. So that’s cool then. Obviously this intervention didn’t stop any reviews going ahead. Their PR firm’s director later added in an official response
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.
Cool. So that’s all right then.
