Pretty much the attitude people have come to expect from games journalists and devs in the past week. Stupid consumers for not realizing that before and for wanting to have journalistic integrity! Let's laugh at them all some more.
Well... yes. Or, more accurately, "Why now?" Why this
particular shitting upon journalistic integrity? Games journalism has had functionally zero integrity since...
ever, to be honest, and in far more far reaching and pervasive ways than this little one. You get this weird uproar over a niche game, with frankly minor -- possibly even
non-existent -- corruption* when every week for
years we've been having systematic and practically
standard shilling out of reviews for cash, early access, etc., so forth, so on. But
this one, somehow, is special? Every response I've seen thus far trying to answer that involves ridiculous tinfoil-hat conspiracy nonsense and a great deal of attempts to redirect the conversation back to being somehow incensed.
This is why people are laughing when others are waving the "journalistic integrity" flag around -- it sounds like a bullshit excuse for other action when the state of integrity in gaming media has been in a sump far deeper than a bit of possibly a little sleeping around and
maybe some PR spinning for a long, long time.
Don't get me wrong, folks're welcome to want more integrity in gaming journalism, it's just that jumping on this particular bandwagon is an incredibly odd way of going about it. The issues involved in it, to the extent there
are any, aren't really the notable issues that gaming journalism is dealing with re: integrity.
*If there's anything of genuine note in this whole kerfluffle it's been one of potential mod overreach, but even that is mitigated a lot by the fact that a great deal of the people they're squishing are being utter jackholes, often to the point of outright breaking laws. Just as boss toad, quite rightfully, kills entire threads and bans discussions on certain topics when they're noted to draw particular forms of behavior, so can other moderators, yeah?