Bethesda Cuts Off Press From Early Reviews, Favors YouTube Let’s Plays Instead

Bethesda has finally put its foot down and is no longer providing the press with early access to their future games for early reviews. The studio will still be providing their titles to YouTubers, however, in order to showcase some parts of their games before release.

Usually, video game publishers send out early copies of their titles to various publications in order to get reviews just in time for launch, Gamasutra reports. However, game publishers and the press have not always seen eye to eye when it comes to reviews.

In fact, Bethesda has expressed a rather negative outlook towards video game reviewers in the past. So it wasn’t really surprising for the company to release a blog post about some shifts in its policies pertaining to these elements. Specifically, Bethesda will now only be providing copies of their games to reviewers a day ahead of the game’s launch.

This same policy doesn’t seem to apply to other forms of media, however, as some YouTubers have been getting early copies of “Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Remastered.” This allowed the content creators to produce short Let’s Play videos, showing off all the things that players can expect from the game.

As Kotaku notes, however, Bethesda is hardly alone in applying such changes to their review policies. 2K, Warner Bros, and Blizzard have also decided to stop sending early copies to reviewers. This has since made reviewing titles much more difficult on the part of reviewers since it’s virtually impossible to have a grasp of a game’s full scope in just one day of playing it.

Kotaku did note that since they were already blacklisted by Bethesda anyway, these changes won’t likely affect them. So for anyone who wants to get some details about games from Bethesda before launch day, their best bet is to search for YouTube channels that were sent copies from now on.