God, I just love it when so-called “professional reporters” “report” on the game industry. Let’s take a headline that came up on my “My Yahoo” page yesterday afternoon, “courtesy” of Information Week. It said: “PlayStation 3 Sales Surpass Xbox 360“. Now what would that headline mean to you, a lay reader? Why, it would probably tell you that there have been more PS3s sold than Xbox 360s, right? Well, you’d be wrong. In fact, by doing some very simple googling, you’d easily be able to see, at VGChartz.com, for example, that Xbox 360 has sold over 17 million units worldwide to PS3’s less than 11 million units. Or 11 million vs. 4 million, respectively, in the US. But what of our headline, then? Well, APPARENTLY, what the headline REALLY means, is that Sony shipped more units than Microsoft IN FEBRUARY 2008. G, would have been nice to mention that in the title, no? All right, so the reporter was playing a little coy to get more people to click on his story. I can dig that. Maybe the good people at Information Week pay their reporters by the click. Fine. But does he at least bother to provide clarification in the article proper? Well, not really. I mean, the article does talk about February sales, but does it bother to put things in perspective of overall sales, given the slightly deceptive headline it chose to use? Nah. That would actually be accurate reporting, and we can’t have that, god forbid.

Thanks a lot, Information Week. Swell job. Mind holding this bucket for a second while I PUKE in it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under Gaming News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.