A few smallish rpg youtubers I watch got sponsored by atlus to do reviews for Persona 3R. I'm sure they would have been favorable either way and aren't gonna affect metacritic or whatever but it still feels weird.
Couldn't the sponsored content be something like 'coolest party members' instead?
Like what happens if you get sponsored for a game that sucks?
The comments are mostly positive so I feel like a party pooper. What do you all think?
Unless I'm misunderstanding and they mean like 'they gave me a free copy's but to me it sounds like they got some sort of payment on top.
Sounds pretty suspect to me; usually reviewers just say the publisher provided a review copy right? Sounds like the kind of shenanigans which used to happen with the vg press
Paid for content should absolutely never be called a "review." Call it something else, like a look-through or preview.
I think calling it a review (or structuring it as one) is definitely weird.
A sponsored playthrough seems fair. On twitch there are a lot of sponsored streams for new releases these days. While the streamer usually won't say anything explicitly negative during the sponsored session, since it's an unedited playthrough you can tell pretty clearly whether they enjoyed the game or not regardless of their commentary.
But this approach doesn't make sense on YouTube where they can just easily cut the footage to make it look good even if it's a trash fire. I vote nay on that one.
