Some background for this post. I mainly play rpgs and strategy games, almost entirely on mobile devices. I frequent two main sites for my hobby: Toucharcade and pockettactics. So it comes out yesterday that pockettactics had been purchased by Slitherine Software back in August. Slitherine is a major producer of strategy games. No one at pockettactics informed the readers about this ownership change, and continued to review and feature Slitherine games for the last four months. It was announced yesterday in advance of the site naming Slitherine co developers of the year. This made me think about who I trust to learn about games. I remember in my younger days reading egm, game informer, nintendo power, etc and relying on their reviews. Now I like to read forums as well, and probably depend more on them than formal reviews. The exception is from a reviewer that I have come to trust, such as Shaun here at Toucharcade. So anyway, anyone else's thoughts?
Shaun is awesome. However, my trust doesn't rest entirely on him. I like others here like Eric. Also, make no mistake. You can have devs or publishers posing as normal users on forum to build up hype. I remember the fishy thing with Stay, Mum. Others must do the same. They are just not caught.
I look at TA, PT & GZ reviews & forums; Appstore reviews & dev websites, then average out to get an overall impression. Or sometimes just take a chance based on description & screenshots.
What does GZ stand for OP I mainly use the forums I only bought one game(Downwell) based on a review last year and didn't like it
While I agree that some posters can be on the forums for the benefit of devs I found the pockettactics issue to be more egregious. The entire site was owned by a publisher. I was surprised that some forum members didn't seem concerned. The community was told they would have no editorial control and they accepted it. I found that hard to swallow. If there was a really bad Slitherine product would they really tear it apart in a review, knowing the people they are ripping are the ones who sign their paycheck? In less obvious examples, will they cover competing games as comprehensively? It really made me appreciate the forums we have at TA.
I do both, as I get more of an official review with the reviews and more hands on experience from the forums.
GZ is for Gamezebo. I also check Metacritic. For the people that don't know about it, they make an average score based on all the review's sites. Also visit everyday PocketGamer, I trust them a lot and they're so cool to read. Obviously TouchArcade is one of my favourites sites, the community is amazing! Gamezebo is another site I check almost everyday. One of the staff is also member of Amazon Studio and their games aren't 5 stars (sorry Amazon, but your games are OK). And there's Appzapp, similar to TouchArcade, an amazing community for gaming on iDevices.
