There is no obligation for publishers to send early copies, although when you don't do it selectively you're sending a bad message that you have something to hide or an axe to grind, so it's pretty bad PR to handle things that way.
Plus nothing stops an outlet from still getting a copy and reviewing the game day one. With so much of today's content being live video the kind of thing you're describing is... pretty inefectual? I get that it's the stuff people remember from the old days when there were more gatekeepers and print media could be reliably delayed by months by doing that, but... yeah, that's pretty anecdotal these days. It's mostly messing with critics' free time, which isn't the best way to get them to be nice to your game, if that's what you're trying to do.
vexikron@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
Instead we get an article here, pontificating on the concept of whether or not its good to report on something that could harm people if its reported on.
It manages to do all the words and stuff to let you know that basically, they can see arguments both ways, but uh in the end its published so kinda just obviously went one way on all that.
The function is, I guess, just to indicate that the writer is conflicted and well informed? But its so obvious theyre just writing a bunch of words to hit a word count because uh its published anyway so the author obviously donesnt care that much for half of what they said.
Then it just ends with like a magical fantasy useless ‘I believe things will get better and we can all be better people’ ending with absolutely no set up or explanation why this might be likely.
Its honestly a baffling piece of writing.
All I can actually take away from it is a hack happened, hacking is bad, the author needed to hit a word count, and I probably should have just read the headline.
I mean here I am commenting on it so thats something, it worked! It got a click rofl!
And with that I need a cigarette.