Eidos PR: Denies Silencing Tomb Raider Underworld Scores

Responding to claims from games website videogaming247, Eidos' PR company has stated that it does not try to control review scores and has not tried to do so with Tomb Raider Underworld.

Simon Byron, a director at Barrington Harvey PR, which handles UK PR for Eidos, has issued a response to the story in which he states, "Barrington Harvey is not in the position of telling reviewers what they can and cannot say. We love Tomb Raider and believe it merits a score of at least 8/10, but if someone disagrees that’s entirely their prerogative. No problem at all. Seriously: no problem.

"Our original NDA stated that in order to receive an advance copy of the game, reviewers agreed not to post reviews ahead of 5:00pm, Wednesday 19th November 2008. Nothing else. No further obligations whatsoever."

The story started with a twitter post from GameSpot's UK editor, Guy Cocker, who wrote, "call from Eidos--if you're planning on reviewing Tomb Raider Underworld at less than an 8.0, we need you to hold your review till Monday."

This was followed by VG247 quoting a BHPR rep as saying, "That’s right. We’re trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos."

VG247 also claimed that a review on the Eurogamer website giving the game 7/10 had "caused problems" - it didn't state what the problems were.

At the time of press, the Metacritic average for the PS3 and 360 versions of the game, which are released today, was 78.

On a related note, Future Publishing's GamesRadar has changed its name to TombRadar for the day as a marketing stunt for Underworld. Coincidentally, the site thought the game was "Awesome", giving it a 9 out 10. James Binns, a publishing director over at Future, told Brand Republic, "Tomb Raider: Underworld is a great game, well worth the 9/10 scores it is picking up across gaming websites and magazines."

Anyway, back to the alleged controlling of review scores. You can see the full statement from BHPR below.

"Barrington Harvey is not in the position of telling reviewers what they can and cannot say. We love Tomb Raider and believe it merits a score of at least 8/10, but if someone disagrees that’s entirely their prerogative. No problem at all. Seriously: no problem.

"Our original NDA stated that in order to receive an advance copy of the game, reviewers agreed not to post reviews ahead of 5:00pm, Wednesday 19th November 2008. Nothing else. No further obligations whatsoever.

"As you can clearly see from the scores posted so far, Barrington Harvey has no issue with scores of below eight out of 10 being posted online. The Eurogamer review in questions caused "problems" in so much as it originally contained a couple of minor factual inaccuracies which, to its credit, the site has quickly rectified and addressed (without, quite rightly, changing the context of the review).

"Any site, be it Gamespot or whoever, is entirely within their rights to post whatever score they want and no-one is under any sort of obligation to delay any review.

"As an ex-journalist myself, I firmly believe in editorial integrity and the right to express an individual opinion. As an agency, we never – ever – make demands of the press in terms of awarding scores; at the end of the day, they are free to score as they wish.

"Barrington Harvey has been working hard to ensure the launch scores of Tomb Raider Underworld are in line with our internal review predictions over the launch weekend – but to suggest that we can in some way 'silence' reviews of the game is slightly overstating our influence."

Guess what? SPOnG will have its review up early next week - mainly because we only bought our copy today. We don't know what score it will be receiving yet.

^{Sources:
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VG247}