Today there’s been a fair bit of discussion about the nebulous ‘Review Embargo’. What is it? How does a Review Embargo work exactly? As a Reviews Editor who has completed over three-hundred ’embargoed’ reviews and helped our team publish hundreds more, I figured I’d step in and share a little more information. There’s nothing here that’s a big industry secret – or honestly – that goes beyond common sense, but I’ll break it down in the broadest and most basic way I can.
Embargo vs. NDA
Most of the time, I hear gamers and fans talk about review NDAs, or non-disclosure agreements. It’s a binding legal document that has you adhere to a set standard of agreed-upon terms, and can either be signed by the individual reviewing the title (I’ve done plenty of those!) or by the owner (Jon has signed a few of these on the teams behalf).
The details can vary, be it the specific information around development, the time the review is released, along with specific and often stringent rules on narratively-focused spoilers being revealed and more. When it comes to reviews, NDAs are rare, with only a few companies tying a review for a game to them. Where you will find them to be more prevalent is around preview events and studio visits.
Embargoes differ in that there is no actual legal agreement signed. There’s no ‘ink on paper’. They are essentially a gentleman’s agreement. To get a review code, the game publisher’s PR company or representative will ask if you agree to withhold all review content until a specific date and time.
There is no DocuSign-style online PDF to fill out. This is trust, extended to you from one team to another. Breaking an agreed-upon embargo can have dire consequences, but not legal ones. It can lead you to potentially being blacklisted by a publisher in some form – Dualshockers, for instance, is no longer on the PlayStation Studios review code list due to a supposed issue of this nature.
In reality, the games industry is a lot smaller than you would think, and the media and PR side is even smaller. From developers to publishers and PR companies, you can expect that if you burn one, you will earn a reputation, and many others will become distrustful of you. Naturally, people talk, and wilfully breaking an embargo is a dangerous – and stupid – game to play. Mistakes can happen, of course – a plugin can go wrong, a time zone can be misunderstood. Typically, if they have known and worked with you for a while and believe it was a mistake, then it can be easy to sort things out.
No, they can’t restrict what we can say.
I have never once had a PR company ask to control editorial content in any way. When it comes to their requested restrictions, it almost always comes down to story and/or game-mechanic spoilers, which most reviewers will avoid spoiling anyway. Though it’s worth noting from personal experience – Eastern developers are extra-cautious around story spoilers, even for licensed IP anime games that are retelling stories from a manga or TV show.
When working on a review for larger, ‘AAA’ titles, many codes come with a detailed guide. For bigger titles, this can be a full-on slide-deck presentation with helpful hints, backstory, and all of the specifics the developer wants us to know about what they have made. These are typically never released to the public, unfortunately, so I cannot share any specific examples. Most smaller games give you the embargo timing, a link to any press kits and media for help with screenshots and thumbnail creation, and often a broad overview of the game to help you get started.
“The Embargo is the day of Release – and that’s a bad sign.”
The above often-repeated bit of conjecture often doesn’t really have any basis in truth. I have found that it rarely correlates in any meaningful way by default. Most embargoes are one or two days before a game comes out. Many are on the day of release to the minute it becomes available, and of course there’s the rare game, like Sony’s upcoming release Ghost of Yotei, that can have a review published a full week before it can be purchased by the public.
Outside of that full week, I’ve seen zero correlation in quality between how close release is to the review embargo itself. When a publisher gives a full week, it’s generally an indication they know they have a winner on their hands, and production was ready earlier than it usually is.
Why agree to an embargo at all?
Reviews and previews are a part of any game’s PR marketing cycle, for better or worse. While they have no control over our editorial content and any final score we give, gaming websites – including ours agree to review embargoes because the reality is that if you’re not there when the embargo ends, your content is often not read or viewed at all – and we need to survive too.
For those not in the industry, as it was for me before I joined, it can seem overly symbiotic. In reality, it is the only way any of this works on a broad scale, thanks to Google’s SEO shenanigans and all the AI bullcrap we have to traverse, which has destroyed the web in more ways than one. Reviews themselves generate the majority of their hits at embargo. Be a day or two late, and you might as well have posted an empty page as far as Google search is concerned.
Embargoes, and their less-seen brother, the NDA, give everyone as fair a shot as possible at getting their hard work seen. An agreement on release time and light spoiler restrictions is a fair price to get our content into our communities’ hands as quickly as possible.
If you’re going to all come to consensus on embargo dates, then why wouldn’t you all ask publishers to lift them at LATER dates, a few days post-launch?
Sales don’t HAVE to be as much as possible as soon as possible — they often aren’t anyway, with a good bulk of sales generated past the first month. Reviews don’t usually shift the needle on sales revenue regardless (as per Alannah Pearce). Consumers need to train themselves to wait or think with more tools that they don’t realise they have, and you won’t have to pull your hairs out trying to finish on time… Well, not as much anyway.
I only skimmed through the other parts of this article, as I’ve debated embargoes to death and share the lamentations with you that publishing “content” (media) asap is the only way for y’all to get clicks. You can also blame the consumer for all of that.
Other than that, though, I find it crass for people to push out reviews before anyone else — before release — which I remember sometimes happening. Hence, I agree with the existence of embargoes, as a concept… But in practice, something needs to change. If not this, then maybe the gosh-darn leak culture and rumour mills, or the extreme redundancy in articles (think GameRant repeating their theses and headline statements just to abuse content algorithms).
You’re all gonna lose more and more people across all demographics if you keep up some of these practices. I myself largely stopped watching the vast majority of gaming-related Youtube and Twitch: news, editorials, reviews, etc. — including guides.
I don’t think anyone wants to write the way Google demands, but websites cannot exist without it. There is no way to change it unless Google themselves do.