Bungie’s position on day one reviews: A game theory perspective
Link: http://www.gamespot.com/articles/bungie-warns-destiny-day-one-reviews-might-not-tel/1100-6422161/
Bungie’s newest video game Destiny has garnered a fair bit of praise from gamers themselves and business publications as well for exceeding $500 million on the first day, however Bungie themselves have publicly expressed caution for gamers to trust reviews published on “day one” stating that the game is much more complex and requires a more playtime than a single day to achieve the full experience. Bungie’s community manager suggests that “We fully anticipate seeing day one reviews from folks who decide to kick the tires, but don’t have the time or patience to take our ride for a nice, long road trip.”
However, this leaves an interesting proposition for the game reviewers themselves. WCCF Tech suggests that the reviewers are in somewhat of a prisoner’s dilemma after Bungie’s statement.
http://wccftech.com/bungie-prisoners-dilemma-dont-trust-day-reviews/
By opting to follow Bungie’s advice, no particular blog or game review site will gain any advantages over the other and Bungie is content. However if one publication chooses to publish a review despite Bungie’s warning, Google and other search engines will be quick to pick up on it and the site will rake in a very sizable number of reviews compared to sites that chose to wait on their review. Finally the last option of course is all the publications releasing a review, a situation where no one specifically will obtain an increased number of view but on top of that will gain bad PR for not listening to Bungie.
While such consequences such as “bad PR” may not be an incredibly imposing deterrence with the opportunity of increased site traffic, it is still interesting to see the situation viewed in terms of game theory.