Last month I wrote a column for Gamasutra about how videogame publicists seem to be increasingly restricting reviewer access to games until the very last minute.

Publishers have always held poor games back from reviewers, often refusing to send a copy even after release, but this piece was more concerned with those titles which are expected to perform and review well. If your game is good, why hold it back from those with the voice to call it so?

The thrust of the argument was that, in holding a game back until the eleventh hour, PRs could force reviewers to rely more heavily on pre-release information and hype to fill in the gaps in their knowledge and experience when critiquing a game. In an internet age, few publications delay their reviews past release date when its effectiveness and usefulness to readers diminishes with every passing hour.

While it’s easy to think that, as an immature industry, this kind of practice is unique to videogames, yesterday The Guardian published a piece by film critic Mark Lawson in which he identifies the exact same trend in the movie industry. His piece, entitled ‘Eek! Who Let the Critic In?‘ claims that “publicists have come up with a novel way of stopping reviewers from slating the latest films, TV shows and books: shutting them out”.

He argues: “It’s easy to understand why publicists are looking at ways of bypassing conventional critics. For example, the considerable majority of those who regularly review films in Britain are, like me, white males over the age of 40 who tend to prize originality over repetition and realism above sentimentality. These demographics and values are completely the opposite of cinema’s main target audience: 15-24-year-olds seeking, in two senses, a big release on a Friday or Saturday night.

“As a result, the cinematic commentariat tends to be far keener than potential ticket-buyers on small-scale, brainy pieces (such as, recently, the quirky drama Son of Rambow or the political documentary Taxi to the Dark Side), while rating many very profitable genres far lower than cinema-goers do: chick flicks, romcoms, horror, children’s films and any returning title that is followed by a number higher than 2. That attitude to sequels is typical of the fundamental philosophical difference between serious critics, who flinch at the idea that they know what they will get, and civilian audiences, who are often attracted by familiarity.”

It’s an argument I hadn’t thought of before but which I think equally applies to videogame criticism. Now that many game reviewers are 30 and over there is to be an gap in experience, understanding and expectation between consumer and critic, and that seems like a strong reason for publicists to hold back review copies of certain titles which are more likely to appeal to the former group.

On the theme of the divide between critic and consumer, I was (stupidly) astounded by the response to my Crisis Core review on Eurogamer yesterday. The first page of the review talked about the original Final Fantasy VII, the seminal, decade-old RPG from which Crisis Core is a spin-off.

I argue that, as culture has moved on, and we’ve grown up, the mythology has failed to grow with us; that the terrible recent spin-offs mean the original game ‘holds a place in our hearts as something we did when we were younger, something magical and transformative and important but something to be remembered and not interminably revisited.’

It’s hardly an unreasonable suggestion and, while I understand that readers who disagree with that point of view would be irritated by the use of ‘we’, I was certainly speaking for a large group of disenfranchised fans, a group that Square-Enix itself has talked about openly and to whom Crisis Core is a direct response.

However, the vast majority of commentators were outraged by the words calling me, amongst other things, a ‘stupid fool’, a ‘drunk monkey’, ‘not worth reading’ ‘patronising’ and ‘ill-informed’.

I love Final Fantasy VII but I also understand that I fell in love with it at 18-years-old and that things you love when you’re a teenager hold a different sort of appeal when you’re an adult. I’m super informed about the game and its universe having interviewed on separate occasions both Yoshinori Kitase, Tetsuya Nomura and Nobuo Uematsu about this specific game and mythology. The point of the introduction was not to speak for everyone but to speak for that large group of gamers for whom the memory of Final Fantasy VII had been sullied by the recent spin-offs. This in turn sets up the case that Crisis Core is, in very real terms, the company’s last ditch attempt at bringing the disenfranchised back into the fold, a target which, from my perspective, the game mostly missed.

I’d stand by the review to the hilt. I’d say to many of these commentators: return to the piece in six months time, when you’ve nothing to lose, when you no longer need your purchase validated and I’m certain you’ll find lots of what it says to be true.

Nevertheless, the whole situation has, one again, reminded me that there is a very real gap between critic and consumer. As Mark Lawson puts it, we look for different things in our games and, as we increasingly belong to different generations, oftentimes our perspectives clash.

While I know that there are people who appreciated the review (I had encouraging e-mails from a few contemporaries, but they are critics) many readers did not because its tough stance doesn’t resonate with their feelings. Does that make the piece worthless or useless in its intended aim? Right now, I really don’t know.