If you’ve been following the news on social media today, you have probably seen a lot of chatter about how there are next to no Xbox reviews for Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 4 on Metacritic. There’s 2 of them to be exact, and one of them happens to be our review. But what is the reason for this? There is a lot of talk about it, but I know not many understand the process. So let’s talk about it with a bit of insider baseball talk.

For some context, I own the website you are reading this article on, and I am typically the point of contact for most of our interaction with PR companies and publishers. Before starting Gamer Social Club I was pretty much known for being a small time Xbox influencer on social media. For as unbiased as I try to be, I am an Xbox gamer through and through. It is the only platform I game on and the platform I talk about most.

The lack of Xbox reviews has been an issue for years, well before Gamer Social Club existed. I never understood why, but after dealing with PR firms for going on 3 years I now have a better sense of things, and can speak first hand on why Xbox is often left in the dust when it comes to reviewers. And while yes a big part of it is that reviewers simply prefer to play on PlayStation or PC, it goes much deeper than that.

The Process For Getting Reviews

How an outlet gets review codes is really all about their relationships with PR companies and publishers. When we first started out we were tiny with no contacts, I had to send what felt like a billion emails to every PR person I could find to request games essentially pitching our site. When I did get a response that was more than a “thanks for your interest” those responses typically asked things like what platform do you want to review on, can you stick to the embargo etc.

Nowadays we are a bit bigger of an outlet, though by no means one of the major sites out there. But us being on things like Metacritic and our reach growing has certainly helped, so to has our relationships. Often times we are simply sent games without doing the initial outreach. I can’t tell you how many games, specifically indies we get each and every day that we simply have to say no to or ignore because we don’t have the capacity.

Now 90% of the time those initial outreaches from PR teams is for a Steam review code. About 9% is for PlayStation and 1% is for Xbox. The Xbox ones are typically from PR reps we have a close relationship with that know a bunch of our writers prefer Xbox. So right off the bat, the publisher is already pushing reviewers towards a PC review.

Publishers will also hold onto codes until release day for certain outlets. I know both first hand and through others times when codes will have gone out say 2 weeks before a game releases and then on release day more outlets will get codes. Is that because those outlets aren’t trusted for embargo, or more codes are printed on release, I’m not sure.

Can You Ask For Something Else?

So you have your outreach from the PR team and they have given you a PC code. What if you don’t want PC, can you change? The short answer is absolutely. Most of those emails include something along the lines of “here is your Steam code, if you’d prefer to review on PlayStation or Xbox let us know.” Seems easy enough right? Well not exactly.

The biggest issue for console reviews is that sentence is often followed by “but console codes will be available closer to release.” Yes even PlayStation 5 codes can often be delayed compared to the PC codes. It isn’t as often as the Xbox codes, but it does happen. The bigger issue for Xbox reviewers however is that they are even more delayed than PlayStation. Sometimes to the point that Xbox codes don’t come until launch.

For most outlets that is a big problem. Getting a review out on embargo is a big deal and typically when you get the most eyes on your review, social media etc. That’s why a lot of reviewers don’t finish games before getting their review out, because the power of the embargo holds. Having even a day or 2 less with an Xbox version is a big deal, let alone waiting to launch.

Why Is This And How Can Xbox Fix It?

So what exactly is the reason for Xbox codes to come to outlets later? Well there’s a few reasons actually. As Windows Central pointed out in their article today, Xbox nowadays does a process called whitelisting. This requires the reviewer to hand over their console serial number to get access to the game. I assume this is more a security thing that Xbox does.

And while whitelisting definitely is a thing, I don’t think it’s as big of an issue as Windows Central made it out to be. I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve had to submit our Xbox console information for a review, and it’s never actually delayed our access to the game. Is it annoying? Absolutely. Is it a reason to choose a different platform? I don’t think so.

Also Windows Central said that this isn’t an issue on PlayStation, and while it happens less frequently, we have had to submit console information for at least 1 game on that platform as well, so that isn’t just an Xbox issue. In their defense they only focus on Xbox and PC, so they likely wouldn’t have known that.

The bigger issue for Xbox is its certification process. When a game is ready to to be sold, the publisher submits it to the platform holders. They say we want to sell the game on this date here’s the info and we need X amount of codes to be distributed.

The platform holders then review the game to ensure it is in fact a real game, is playable etc etc and then tells the publisher the game is good to go on our platform, processes the codes and hands them over for distribution. Publisher then distributes the codes to whomever they were going to give them to.

For whatever reason that certification process takes much longer on Xbox than it does on other platforms. Are the publishers just giving Xbox the game later than the other platforms because its not as much of a priority? Does Xbox just take longer to certify? And if they do take longer, why? Are they more thorough with their testing? Do they not prioritize the process? These are questions I don’t really have the answer to.

To their credit I have brought this process and the frustration that comes with it up to some of the highers ups within Xbox that would have the ability to look into things back in May of this year and they said they would look into it. Scott Van Vliet, Chief Technology Officer at Xbox, came out earlier tonight and seemed to suggest the whitelisting issue is being worked on as well.

Do Publishers Withhold Certain Platforms?

This question is one that I can’t answer, but it does make me wonder. As I mentioned, they typically push you towards PC initially. Part of that is its easiest to get certified on Steam, but I’d imagine another part of it is they want as many reviews as possible on a specific platform for the Metacritic score.

We know that bonuses are often tied to Metacritic scores, so I wouldn’t doubt this to be at least somewhat true. I recently even had a publisher offer us a review code post launch and explicitly said we can have a code for any platform except Xbox. They had a couple of reviews for Xbox already so I knew they had Xbox codes, it was a weird response nonetheless.

This is one of the issues with Metacritics system and how they split reviews. Perhaps they should combine all the review scores into one number rather than splitting them by platforms. To their credit they know there are gaps in their coverage for Xbox, it’s one of the reasons we got accepted onto the platform, but there is only so much they can do.

Overall though I would say the bigger issue is the process to get Xbox codes. And while Xbox can’t do anything to change those who prefer other platforms, they can definitely do a better job of making it easier for those of us who do want to review on Xbox. Hopefully the continued chatter around it will help us in the long run.