One of my biggest pet peeves as a journalist/critic is when a developer / publisher / PR emails / messages me and offers me access to a game for preview or review with the phrasing of looking for "support" in my coverage.

I'll explain, a thread.

First and foremost, the role of a journalist/critic is not to "support" things that we write about, it's to cover them honestly. This means analyzing and recognizing/communicating both things that I like and things that I don't. The concept of "support" implies positive coverage.

This happens most often with indies, especially in VR. There is this preconceived notion that, because VR is still very small relatively speaking, our role as a media outlet is to "support" content and "support" the industry.

That's not true and it's not healthy or productive. Not only is it a disservice to gloss over issues in the name of "support" for an industry, but that's just not what our job is. Our commitment is to the consumer and providing articulate analysis / criticism.

Sometimes I'll see the argument that it "hurts" the industry to be negative, but I'd argue it's far worse in the long run to ignore issues and not call out bad practices or not criticize things we don't like.

Yes, a lot of this can apply to the Cyberpunk discourse as well. Yes, all of this is directly related to the assertion that reviews should be "objective" etc etc which is antithetical to the point of a review.

Anyway, that's the thread.