Regarding Wednesday's comic (which concerned the production of dubious promotional materials), an anonymous producer from an anonymous production company chimed in with the following:
Just an anonymous (if you don't mind) bit of knowledge for you on most Gamespot (and now other online preview places)...We (the publisher) send out two levels of images to reviewers on an "Art Asset" CD. One level is a high quality BMP, usually about 2MB-4MB range. The next is a pretty strong quality JPG usually 350-700KB. What SOME places like Gamespot do is take the lower quality one, put it through what I term the "video grinder" and shove it back out to the public in a 50-65KB choppy piece of shit that is nearly blurred out of existence.
This recent rash of "what do I care what it looks like so long as my bandwidth is low?" attitude has caused us to rethink how we (in production) are sending screenshots to our PR people who then send them out to these schmucks that post the chopped-to-hell images on the net for fans to (rightfully) mock. I can understand conserving a little cash on bandwidth, but at least put the fucking images through a photo editing program like ohhhh...I dunno....PHOTOSHOP, rather than MS Paint.
Interesting. This isn't the first I've heard about friction between publishers and gaming journalism as an industry - the last guy who spoke to me off the record expressed frustration with IGN, who often locks their best stuff away in a magic box.
(CW)TB
