Well Bioware are owned by EA so I lumped them under the EA banner. The only other recent abuse was by Activision, specifically the CEO of Sledgehammer games who urged all the Modern Warfare fans to push the score up. His tweet was later deleted.

Lmao, I'll bet Kotick pulled himself out of his drug addled haze long enough to realize that could very well backfire. I guess he's totally worth the 50 million per year they're probably paying him...

The reason I don't like lumping Bioware BS under EA is all of the recent bullshit coming out of EA seems to be from them and it doesn't seem fair to paint every EA developer with some broad brush just because they have one prima dona developer that's becoming hard to control.

Ugh Telltale don't go all shitty, you're a good company.

yeah all this stuff is really disappointing to hear. I was a pretty big fan of t them but now yeah I dunno

Telltale was the company that got me interested in buying games straight from the devs instead of at places like Steam... so I'm also disappointed. :(

The nasty thing about Kotick is he 'only' earns 500k a year, that's his official salary. However he has large bonus payments which last year amounted to $5 million on top of his salary. he get's those bonuses just as you imagine he does by keeping costs down and profits high by of course treating developers like shit. I'm sure Kotick isn't the only CEO on that pay structure and there are probably similar deals with Ritticiello at EA and Gulliemot at Ubisoft.

Actually that's kind of low for a CEO, I'd be somewhat surprised if there wasn't some other compensation hidden in there somewhere (beyond the hookers and blow that is); regardless you're correct that that's a common tactic to remunerate CEOs (and some other CXO positions) in the US at least.

Employees of game companies do this all the time for games that they have worked on. They're proud of their product and want it to be successful. Whether you like it or not, it's highly unlikely that the company is suggesting that they write reviews and seems misguided to blame the company for it.

There was a post from a Telltale employee on reddit responding to the whole jeep thing. I didn't read either side because A) I honestly don't care and B) I'm not planning on purchasing the Jurassic Park season until it hits $5. I wouldn't trust anything posted on r/gaming, personally, because it is a giant rage-building feedback loop.

In all honesty, I don't really see a problem with this, they're entitled to their opinion like anyone else. I mean, it's Metacritic user reviews, second only to Amazon in terms of insane rabid bias. But the fact is that this nearly always results in a backlash, so just don't do it. We get it, you're proud of the game, but there are better places (like Twitter and such) to promote your success.

But it's not like I've lost any respect for Telltale, and people calling for the employees to be fired need to chill out and realize that they're talking about people's livelihood. Would you like to get fired for posting a stupid forum promoting your blog?

To be fair, the few guys who posted the reviews are new employees. I'm just curious as to how the management will deal with them ...

It's already confirmed that they're not going to get fired at the very least. I assume they'll be getting a stern talking to though.

This is why you shouldn't put much trust on metacritic.

LOL I don't need reviews to know that a game based on a movie like Jurrasic Park is most likely garbage. :D Never even bothered looking into that game. The words: Dumb, Buggy, Weak-story, Very short, and horrible controls, immediately came into my mind. Of course I have no idea if I'm right, and don't really much care.
If a company has employees that do this, that says a lot to me about them and their games. First off, that the company was okay with releasing a poorly made game. They had to know that. Secondly, that the employees were so desperate to get higher sales, and maybe some excuses for their bosses, that they felt pressured enough to post these reviews. Well that says it by it's own self good enough, I think.
I tell you, the bigger a company gets the more blind they get to the truth right in front of their faces. They should all hire somebody who can say whatever they want and never get fired, as long as they give it to them straight that is...The offical title would be like: Spin-Finder or Truth-Beast or something. Genius! Ah, my fantasy world, a lovely place indeed. ;-P
Instead, Let us write this book: "How to Make a Crappy Game, and Lie Like Crap About It!"
WIth the following chapter titles:
Chapter One: "Oops. So you are making another crappy game."
Chapter Two: "Pretending it's not crappy, until it's too late to change it."
Chapter Three: "Staying the crappy course, and pretending it's genius."
Chapter Four: "What to do when the boss calls asking to see what you have, and you have nothing, but crap."
Chapter Five: "A quick guide to trashing the unique ideas, and squeezing out another clone, Part one."
Chapter Six: "Part two, yes it is this easy!"
Chapter Seven: "So you're now 3 months behind schedule? Take a vacation, it will help!"
Chapter Eight: "Oh, no! The boss is coming. How to pick the one person on the team that isn't a butt-kisser and blame it all on them!"
Chapter Nine: "How to fire the non-butt-kissing looser, and not have them go postal."
Chapter Ten: "The boss now knows it's a crappy game, time to rush it to completion before his boss finds out!"
Chapter Eleven: "Eleventh hour fixes. Who needs them? Not you!"
Chapter Twleve: "What to say before release day. How to make crap sound like candy."
Chapter Thirteen: "Writing false reviews: Includes standard forms copy and pastable, and hints on how to keep the vomit down as you type pure crap about crap."
Chapter Fourteen: "Release day, and how to not crap your pants."
Chapter Fifteen: "How to blame it all on the crappy publisher, who didn't give enough time or resources!"
Chapter Sixteen: "Bahamas"
Chapter Seventeen: "OH CRAP, this is real!"
Chapter Eighteen: "Finding a job in the fast food industry, Part one: So you want to be a fry cook."
Chapter Nineteen: "Part two: How to buy our book: Climbing the Fast Food Ladder Using Deceit, Lies, the Blame Game, and Other Crappy Crap. It Really Works!"

I hoped you liked it, sorry for going off topic, but, once I started well, I couldn't stop. ;-D
Truthfully I know it's hard work to make a game, even ones that turn out bad. I know someone put their heart, soul, and life into it. It's too bad all games dont' turn out good...Still who knows maybe this Jurrasic Park won't be all crap eh? ;)

Sure it's fine to post your opinions, but all of them (except one) tried to made their reviews appear as if written by the outsider public. That's a problem because it's unprofessional and untruthful. It's not that they couldn't show pride or boastful of their work, it's that they did it in a wrong way.

They are also representatives of their company, whether they realized it or not. An accusation of these employees trying to 'abuse' user scores is a pretty big deal for the company because it's in the end it becomes a problem for Telltale's PR. I do feel bad for the employees because they probably didn't think about all this and just wanted to spread the word on their labour of love. No doubt they'll be thinking about such consequences of their actions from now on.

Yes, "USER REVIEWS", the developer isn't an average user if they can even be called a user at all, they're the damned developer.

Still, it's not like we mind all that much that they're saying "we love this game that we worked on" but they need to include that last part, because they might not be objective, just like a journalist who has ties to someone involved in a story they covered would be obliged to disclose such a detail (they call that "integrity" in that field).

And frankly, they're just flunkies, they want to gush, fine, so long as they do it honestly, but you have to realize that game devs get all kinds of access to promote their games in channels, there are relatively few "user" channels for this sort of thing that have any critical mass. So there's a valid reason why gamers might want the devs to just shut the hell up in the channels meant for end users. I love talking with devs, I spend most of my PAX time chatting up anyone I can, but honestly there's a proper place for that and "user reviews" for your own product is probably the wrong place in many cases (there could be plenty of valid exceptions, of course, but in general those are exceptions, not the rule).