APB’s Review Embargo is Ten Days After Launch

[Disclosure: I, and a number of staff, have played APB and thought it was disappointing. APB's PR have shafted us on a number of occasions, prioritising other publications over us and subsequently turning us away at the door from preview events we had arranged, multiple times.]

Update: Realtime Worlds have issued a statement, and have moved the embargo date forward to July 2nd. The original article continues below.

It’s common for games, usually if the developer or publisher think it will review poorly, to have review embargoes (which are gentleman’s agreements, rather than contracts) set for the date of the game’s release. All Points Bulletin, the new MMOish game from Realtime Worlds has gone one step further and has told reviewers (including us) that the review embargo is on the 6th of July, ten days after the game’s launch.

The reasoning given to us for this embargo is simply that the game is very large, and has a huge amount of customisation. It would be unfair to the game to review it before seeing real people interacting in the game world.

The strange thing, to me, is that this reasoning isn’t for the game-makers to decide on, it’s for the publication to choose. I know many sites (none of which I am specifically referencing here) whose reviews I have zero trust in. Sometimes they don’t play more than a few hours of a game, sometimes they’ll review an MMO on day one having only played a preview and let their readers assume they played the final product. I know other sites who happily go to multi-thousand-dollar-costing review events to play a game in utterly unrealistic settings (sometimes with the developer sat next to them), and again neglect to tell their readers. But this is the publication’s choice.

If you want to read some more on the issue, Rock, Paper, Shotgun‘s John Walker has posted his thoughts which are worth a read.

Nukezilla will be publishing our APB review when we have decided we have played enough.