Dead Effect 2 Dev Reportedly Blacklists Blackball Media Outlets Who Give Negative Reviews

There is always controversy surrounding the games journalism medium and the way each outlet handles its reviews. Some suspect that writers are sometimes influenced by publishers to deliver a positive review even if they didn’t like the game, which is what we have in our case.

COGconnected reportedly received a red tape with its Dead Effect 2 review codes from Czech developer BadFly Interactive. It warned the outlet from writing a negative review or they won’t receive any keys from the publisher ever again.

“If your review of preview of Dead Effect 2 is very negative, you won’t receive any keys from us in the future.”

“Let me just mention one thing, though: this is an indie game which, unfortunately, is very often compared with big-budget games, and that’s quite a problem and very much damages its reputation in final ratings. Please take into consideration the fact that this game was created by a small team of developers (11) who just try to develop a good shooter game, and that’s about it. Unfortunately, a number of journalists have other, much bigger expectations from it, and that’s very damaging for us eventually. Also, we’re working on several other games that are definitely interesting, and if your review or preview of Dead Effect 2 is very negative, you won’t receive any keys from us in the future.”

COGconnected didn’t fear the warning and wrote about it openly, which made the studio reply to the tweet and send them a new email that we still don’t know its content.

We salute COGconnected for doing the right thing.