The video game review process is broken - The Washington Post

Most writers are at the mercy of Google’s search engine, and time their work to the peaks at which people are seeking out reviews. Take an extra day to polish your prose, and you’ve given up pageviews to your competitors. Google’s search engine takes a lot of factors into account, but I doubt it has any perspective on the artfulness of a much-agonized-over introductory paragraph. The system rewards speed.

This resonates so hard for me. I’m not on Apple’s radar, and that means at best I get their new products the day they are released. I have no way to hit the embargo date, so I’m relegated to posting my reviews a week or more after the rest of reviewers get theirs out there.

I recently posted my review of the iPhone 13 Pro, which I thought was a fun review, but didn’t rack up the same number of views as I had hoped it would. When I mentioned this on Twitter, someone mentioned that they expected people were burned out on reviews of the phone already, so they weren’t looking for another one. They were totally right, too! I personally watched a bunch of reviews of the new iPhones when the embargo dropped, but I’ve skipped the rest in my feed that happened after the embargoed ones dropped.

I’m not sure what to do with this other than to say please check out reviews from people who aren’t in the early review club.