Games journalism is an interesting industry. It consists of grown adults writing about a new and exciting form of entertainment, and writing reviews for releases. It can be so many things, and one could only really go into the industry of writing about games hopefully from the perspective of doing a service to the everyday game player, and resisting the urge to give in and be a simple marketing tool for major publishers.

Yet in the wake of Mass Effect 3, this has been proven to be far from the truth. When such great paragons of their craft, like Dave Cook and Ben Kuchera unapologetically take the side of Bioware, it shows that they don’t have a loyalty to their job or their readers. It shows that they have no problem accepting the perks of being a games journalist and the access it brings, it shows they have no questions worth asking. When Forbes of all places is the only place doing real journalism on a major issue, it’s a sad state of affairs. 

Are we at the point where we should simply stop bothering reading Kotaku, Giant Bomb, and other sites? We can’t rely on them for quality commentary, we can’t rely on them for honest reviews, and in the end, they damn us all as another cog in the corporate machine, mutilating the purity of an art form.