FPSLabs : Set the controls for the heart of the sun

To those called out in this rant: don’t take it the wrong way. I’m going after the core of the problem here, not it’s vehicles.

This hardware industry thing we deal with day in and day out can get pretty tedious. It has been called boring on more than one occasion for sure, and it has certainly gone through periods of stagnation that do not exactly lend themselves to excitement. You would think that during these times, the lack of new products and technology would make the life of the hardware reviewer exceptionally boring as well. It was not too long ago that probably the worst of these stagnate periods occurred, and to say that my job was not exactly as thrilling as it usually is would not only be an understatement, but wouldn’t be a very good statement at all since “thrilling” isn’t really an adjective I would use to describe my day. OK, so thrilling my days were not. But boring? Would I go so far as to call my job boring during the slow times in technological developments? Hell no.

For me, and I think my thoughts are shared by the FPSLabs editorial team, writing about anything hardware-related and the learning process involved is far from boring. Even if we’ve written about something ten times in the past, we never cease to be interested in the product or technology we are talking about. All things hardware-related are just inherently cool for us, and you will never read an article, news story, or blog on FPSLabs that doesn’t express that sentiment in one way or another.

Unfortunately, however, it would seem that more and more we are becoming the minority in this train of thought. Reviews that we read from other publications tend to exude, no matter how well masked, that the author is just plain not interested in what they’re writing about. The everyday reader might not pick up on this as easily as we do, and I wouldn’t really call that a bad thing. If readers are interested in reading what uninterested writers write about, then so be it. That drives the sales of magazines and traffic to websites that keeps the hardware review industry afloat. However, a couple of articles we have read recently really raise some red flags; not because the articles make the writer sound uninterested, but because somehow, someway, someone decided it would be OK to half-ass reviews. A note to these publications: Hardware Reviews – You’re doing it wrong.

We have noticed it for years, but it has come to a point now where not writing about it would be a critical mistake. It happens mostly in print magazines, where space is at a premium and for most editors fewer words is a good thing. Sure, publications are trying to save money by limiting the amount of words they have to pay the authors for and minimizing the size of the articles in an effort to maximize advertising real estate, but that is no excuse for the incredible number of half-assed reviews we have seen lately.

When a company sends their product to a publication for a review, they do so on their own dime, out of good faith, and expect that not only will their product be given a thorough and fair evaluation, but that the publication will treat their products with care. It is a pretty simple exchange and, for the most part, the entire hardware review industry was built on these fundamental transactions. However, the relationships have become increasingly one-sided toward the reviewers lately, and believe me when I tell you that this is a very bad thing. You would think that being a hardware reviewer I would be all for anything that gives me more power, but in doing so you would be wrong.

Let me give an example. A manufacturer of expensive computer systems sends a fully-configured machine to a print magazine for review. Two months later, a highly-opinionated review is published that points out all the wrong things and does not represent the same kind of critical evaluation that potential customers of the manufacturer would perform before purchasing, no matter how much the author’s experience or industry clout would suggest otherwise.

If this reads as if it is an extreme and uncommon series of events, you can rest assured that it is not. I did some informal research about this after I read Games for Windows Magazine’s “Ultimate Gaming Machine 2007” review that was published in their March issue. I called or emailed a couple of the system integrators involved in that review with a set of questions regarding the procedures and things they went through from the time they sent the system to the time the review was published. Since I was already operating on certain suspicions, the answers I received did not really surprise me, but perhaps they will you. I asked four of the companies involved in this review when they sent out their systems and whether or not they had gotten it back from Games For Windows (GFW). All four companies informed me after a bit of digging that the deadline for the UGM submissions was the first week of December (2007). In addition, all four companies told me they had not yet received their systems back from the magazine. This means, considering the date I asked in mid-February, that GFW had these systems for over two months. I called one of the companies back recently, and not only did they tell me that they still hadn’t received their system, but they invited me over to see for myself. I declined because obviously they had no reason to lie to me, but I thought that was pretty crazy nevertheless. So GFW has had these systems, no less (but maybe more) than eight of them, which cost an estimated $6000 each, for almost 3 months (if the company we contacted is typical). Undstandably the review has been published for a while now and was probably completed well before the publishing date would lead you to believe, but what they hell are they doing? The companies we questioned also relayed their experiences with this particular review, noting that there was very little correspondence from the editors at the magazine. This would seem normal, since they were probably very busy testing the systems, but still seems like something that should be done when a company has lent you a $6000 system to mess around with.

You might have started to see where I am going with this, and you are probably right. I have a lot more to say about this topic, but for now I have noticed that this blog is excessively long and I will have to do a part 1 and part 2 to make it tolerable. Trust me when I say the next one will be at least as interesting at this one. Not that I am suggestion this one was interesting. Stay tuned.

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