Pretty much everyone goes to Giant Bomb for the videos and not the text content, so this probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
"primarily provide the limited purpose of reinforcing the readers prejudices"
Could you elaborate on exactly what he means here?
^No, I can't eleborate on what he meant (I'm not him). 
Do note though that you cut that sentence off.
He did not speak about it in any greater detail than what I relayed here, so I really cannot provide any insight into his thoughts beyond which I have already provided.
He spoke about it at a PAX panel, which he said audio may surface at some point (it was not for his site, I thikn he said The Verge was recording it, so if they publish it I will let you know).
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You talk about the traffic to their site and where it goes. I bet that factors into his thought process, where he sees what people are interested in (the videos), then likely reads the comments on his work and sees nothing more than either sycophants or fanboy bickering. I imagine it would grind on you after a while.
Haha, that's a massive tease. He makes a potentially interesting statement like that then says "O BTW WENT INTO DETAIL @ PAX! BUT U NO GO 2 PAX SO FU!".
I've mentioned this several times in the past, but it's not about complaining, it's about a key point. Because of Golden Sun, I won't even review a game until I've at least verified I'm at the final boss. The latter part of a game can make or break it. You can get an idea of the basic mechanics, art style and general gameplay in a first impressions, but it hardly accounts for whether or not you can recommend the game. How can you recommend something you've barely played?
Basically, it's a platform to give a viewer basic information to go off of because they don't trust your actual opinion.
Borderlands is great for the first 20 minutes! Sucks ass after the first couple hours, but hey, first impressions!
Destruction Derby is amazing for an hour or two, then it runs dry, and fast. First impressions!
I don't read reviews because I'm fine if a game is lousy, in fact I expect it. But if you have any desire in determining what is actually any good, and making a recommendation on the quality of a given game, you can't by any reasonable conscience do so off of an early 20 minute video preview.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobileYodariquo said:...
I don't read reviews because I'm fine if a game is lousy, in fact I expect it...
Exactly. I think this was his point. What relevance do reviews even have as a buying guide to the core consumers who go to his site? You, me, everyone else in the core community have our own way of determining what we buy. We may read reviews for other reasons, but not as directives for purchasing decisions.
Yodariquo said:... making a recommendation on the quality of a given game, you can't by any reasonable conscience do so off of an early 20 minute video preview.
In the Quicklooks I have seen they don't overtly pass judgement and give a buy/ don't buy reccomendation or a good/ no good assesment. It's more of a , "this is what it looks like, this is how it controls".
The buyers guide thing is pointless to me, I know what I want to buy and no one site will ever determine if I should buy a sleeper or something. I read reviews to get someones opionion on the game and their critique. The only reason I care to read them is cause they get to play the games before we do so I want to know how the entire game turned out.
aspro said:In the Quicklooks I have seen they don't overtly pass judgement and give a buy/ don't buy reccomendation or a good/ no good assesment. It's more of a , "this is what it looks like, this is how it controls".
Maybe it's not their intention, but that's definietly not how the users see them. They're treated not just as a buyer's guide, but as fully-fledged reviews. In fact just take a look at the comments on GB reviews and you'll find a whole lot of angry people when the vibe of a quicklook doesn't match with that of a review.
Why did robotgeek.co.uk move to a ten point system? (If you can say publically).
First and foremost I'd say it was changed from the old system where the total score was calculated by a set of ratings because that resulted in a lot of inaccurate overall scores. Change from a 5 scale with .5 decimals to 10 without decimals I would say was simply for the sake of conformity. Same number of points involved in both, but a 10 point scale is used by more websites than a 5 point scale.
^Okay, so it is really no different.
Yep, except we get to pick the score.
? Before someone else did?
aspro said:? Before someone else did?
No, it was calculated based on scoring certain aspects of the game. In theory this can work well, but unless you have many aspects to rate or a good way to sway the score, in practice it doesn't.
Okay I get it.
A couple of weeks ago when we talked about this it was in the News Forum.
We talked it to death, and then some more at the start of Episode 126.
But Gerstmann said something provocative on his podcast today. And yeah, we'll just get this part out of the way, I know, you don't care what he has to say, and so on, but by his own account he has written close to 7,000 reviews and has made more money convincing others to pay him for his reviews than pretty much anyone else, so he gets to have an opinion. This is not about the quality of his reviews, his personality etc...
Onto what he was saying; he is questioning the usefulness of reviews in their current format on his web site. He has always been in the buyer's guide camp of review philosophy, as opposed to the review as 'critique' school of thought. He says that on his site that their Quicklooks, where they record themselves giving impressions as they play a game for the first time, meets the objectives of a buyer's guide. Users are able to see the game in action, for themselves and listen to an experienced gamer discuss the pros and cons as they go along.
A provocative thought indeed. He was quick to add, that this is his view for his site only.
He added that he thinks reviews as they are now, in all publications, primarily provide the limited purpose of reinforcing the readers prejudices, and serve publishers needs for metrics beyond sales figures.
So, hopefully you have been provoked into thought on this topic. I don't know what I think about it yet.