I don't mind pre-release reviews. I even enjoy doing them. Getting to see something, get my fingers dirty, work into the thing and specifically focus on the aspects that I think will make or break it for people's judgment… I like that.

Now, it just so happens, that a lot of my reviews seem to come out a little more cerebral than most of the gaming press, but I can live with that. Right now I am working out exactly how far I can go with, "no, that you should probably stay away from this" with my current publisher. I have the feeling that they would be generally okay with that sort of finding, as long as I backed it up – which is great.

The real problem for prerelease reviewing at this point in the market is that no one expects the game to be complete or bug free at release anymore. Everyone expects content to be unlocked, day zero patches, and maybe even fairly significant mechanics finally going into place on day of release. Which would be fine if that's what we got to review – but it never is.

If I had my preferences, I probably wouldn't review a game until it's been out for three months so that I could tell people whether it really is the solid game it was promised to be or something else, but in a real sense that's not what people want from reviews. They want to know whether they should buy it today – and today is day of release.

At this point, if you wait six months after release for a lot of AAA titles (and most indie titles), you can get them for 50% off the original asking price – and why wouldn't you? If the game is good, it will continue to be good. If the game is bad, it won't have gotten better in the meantime.

It's a very weird time to be part of the games industry.