Dear Readers,
The review for NCAA 12 previously published in this space has been removed from The Escapist. After further review (as the referees say) we recognized that the review contained factual errors and, in general, was not up to our usual standards of accuracy and fairness. Considering the impact that review scores can and do have on the companies who make videogames and on how you spend your hard-earned money, we were not comfortable standing behind a review that we knew was flawed.
Unfortunately it is the policy of the most widely-recognized review score aggregator, Metacritic, to not alter a posted review score once it has been published. In this instance, I sent a personal note to Metacritic’s founder asking him to waive this policy in light of our acknowledgement of error and to remove our score from the aggregate score for NCAA 12. He refused. Therefore, in spite of our formal retraction, our previously-published review score for NCAA 12 will persist at that site, and will continue to be counted.
On behalf of The Escapist, I apologize to everyone involved with making the game who felt that we had not given their effort the fair and balanced attention it deserved. We did not. I would also like to offer a heartfelt apology to all of you who read this review and felt that it fell short of The Escapist‘s usually high standards. It did. It was not our best effort, and for that I apologize. We are making policy changes to ensure that such a lapse does not occur again. I hope that you will give us a chance to regain your trust.
Sincerely,
Published: Jul 21, 2011 01:00 am