Give Them A Moment, For Pity's Sake

What I'm about to describe here is nothing new, it's simply the latest battle in the never-ending war between games marketing and what's left of traditional games media. But it's also one of the most egregious examples of embargo shenanigans I've seen in recent times, so I thought it was worth highlighting.

Last week, on Friday (May 22), a number of outlets were given code for the new James Bond game, 007 First Light. Alongside this code, they were given a review embargo of Tuesday (May 26), meaning that if they wanted their reviews to be published at said embargo time--the time other outlets would be publishing their reviews, kicking off a feeding frenzy of review comparisons and Metacritic aggregation--whoever was reviewing the game had to not only play and finish the game in a matter of days, but write a review of it as well.

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That is nowhere near enough time to do that in a way that is healthy for anyone. It left outlets with a choice: rush the game (potentially missing stuff or simply not playing it the way it was intended) and subject a writer to a terrible weekend (and a rushed review!) just to hit a deadline, or let their reviewer take their time with it, provide a more measured piece of criticism and miss one of the last surefire ways for traditional games media to juice their pageviews in the modern age.

What ended up happening was a mixed bag of approaches and results that does little but damn the game's marketing apparatus. IGN, easily the most influential critical publication left standing in 2026 and who say they only got their code "over the weekend", has decided to review the game in stages, publishing some initial thoughts for now but holding off on a final score and verdict until they've had time to play it properly. A few smaller outlets have done the same. PC Gamer, another of the biggest outlets still reviewing games, didn't even get code for it.

Meaning that on the big day, the day the game's marketers want to make the most of the review scores, we got a mixed bag of outlets that run the gamut from "traditional powerhouses" to "sites I have literally never heard of.”

I think this is a bad look! I know anyone working in marketing will probably disagree with me, but I'm a games media weirdo writing for an audience of games media sickos, and I think your embargo-day Metacritic page missing scores from IGN and PC Gamer, while being topped by some sites that would have felt compelled to rush the whole experience to meet an unrealistic deadline, is a damning indictment on this game's approach to the press.

I have no idea why the embargo was set so close to the distribution of codes, which is a practice that is depressingly common but which also sucks. Maybe there were technical issues delaying its release, some urgent updates that needed to be applied before letting critics play through it. Maybe it was an intentional ploy to get a certain class of outlet, the ones who would have simply appreciated the code and worked to meet the embargo without question, to be the ones covering the game on embargo day. Maybe, through multiple layers of management and bureaucracy, this is just how things worked out. 

I don't think the why matters much when the end result is the same, though. We've been left with a situation where the participating press have been treated with contempt on one hand while also being used to help tout the game with the other, and while it might seem easy to criticise those outlets for participating, many of them probably felt trapped by circumstance. As AI results erode search traffic and the ad market continues to disappear, traditional games media is left with fewer and fewer chances to rake in some extra pageviews, so a decision to skip an embargo day--when the eyes of the world are drawn to the first review scores to hit the internet--isn't an easy one.

But like...surely there's a better way here. Review crunch like this isn't healthy for those stuck with the task, isn't healthy for the wider relationship between games media and publishers and certainly isn't great for readers, who with rushed embargoes like this aren't getting the depth or quality of criticism they deserve.

I'm glad IGN and others have held off on a final score for now (while acknowledging few other publications have the luxury of doing so), and maybe the only way forward the next time this happens--and there's always a next time with this shenanigans--is for more sites to follow their lead, swallow the short-term pain and buy themselves a little more long-term gain.