This is really sad. Jurassic Park: The Game has the potential to be a sleeper hit, so there is definitely no reason for Telltale’s employees to try and ‘cheat’ gamers by submitting 10/10 reviews on Metacritic. Yeap, after BioWare’s employees, Telltale’s employees were caught posting user reviews on Metacritic. To be more precise, one user interface artist and one cinematic artist were those that were caught posting 10/10 reviews. All we had to do was to ‘google’ their names and find their LinkedIn profiles. According to those profiles, both of them are working on Telltale, though they are relatively new to the studio.
What’s more interesting is Telltale’s statement about this incident. As Telltale told Gamespot:
“Telltale Games do not censor or muzzle its employees in what they post on the internet. However, it is being communicated internally that anyone who posts in an industry forum will acknowledge that they are a Telltale employee. In this instance, two people who were proud of the game they worked on, posted positively on Metacritic under recognizable online forum and XBLA account names.”
In other words, the company admited that those two employees posted their user reviews on Metacritic. Simply, wow. It does take some balls to go out and admit something like that, so kudos to Telltale but what were those employees thinking? They were excited, sure, we get that. But that was stupid to say the least.
Now we do know that this is business and that everyone can post his own opinion, but there is a thin line that should not be crossed, no matter what. Sadly, Telltale has just crossed it and the backlash from the gamers might be severe. Developers should not be acting as user reviewers, that’s a fact. Any gamer who visits Metacritic, wants to know what other gamers think about a specific game. Not what the developers do. After all, the very same thing happened with Dragon Age 2 so they should already know those two employees the consequences of their actions.
It’s also surprising that these two employees didn’t try to cover their tracks. Moreover, it’s really interesting that Telltale admitted this incident. Most companies wouldn’t comment about it. At least the company is honest with us. As for the fate of those two employees… we can already see it coming.
Stupid move guys… really stupid!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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