Cherry picking reviewers?

[george1979]

http://www.kitguru.net/site-news/ann...ative-content/

I'm not overly familiar with KitGuru so I wouldn't pretend to know if this is justified or not but I when I saw this I thought it worthy of discussion at least.

Before anyon.e replies I feel I should point out that I hope to god that AMD's new cards are enough to give the green team a fit but this article does worry me slightly..

[watercooled]

Yeah I'm not really sure what to make of this one. I admittedly don't read KG much but I don't recall them being anti-AMD. I mean they've posted their fair share of rumours-from-a-random-forum articles which turn out to be nonsense but they're far from the only one to do it. Maybe a more regular reader could clarify that.

However picking who you send review samples is nothing new at all, and nothing unique to AMD. Companies will often send out reviewer guides with products encouraging sites to emphasise certain aspects of performance e.g. frame pacing with Nvidia until AMD matched and in some cases exceeded their performance, or stupidly excessive tessellation levels. For AMD, IIRC one of their APU releases had the GPU NDA lifted before the CPU part, presumably because they knew they were stronger there.

WRT withdrawing the sample, I'd be surprised if it was unusual TBH, just KG are probably in the minority of companies to be vocal about it - I think it was OC 3D I was watching who said samples are very limited in Europe and they're struggling to get hold of one. If you're a business, it makes sense to send samples to the biggest sites which aren't biased against your company first in order to get the best coverage. And I haven't seen anyone else complaining in this way yet and we only have one side of the story so :shrug:. Maybe just a misunderstanding somewhere along the line combined with KG being annoyed they're going to miss out on page hits?

[george1979]

Yeah I agree which is why I posted this with a rather large pinch of salt. It just worried me me cos I've been looking for an excuse to switch teams and was hoping Fury would be it (is it Fury? or Fiji?

[GuidoLS]

I've always found KitGuru to be mostly neutral, at least as it regards GPU's. If there's a strength, they're sure to report it. If there's a weakness, they're sure to report it. My impression is that they do somewhat favor Intel over everyone else, but when it comes down to talking points, Intel does, at this time, make the superior CPU.

As far as AMD goes, the news lately, beyond the Fury/X release, is that the 300 line is, if not a complete, almost total rebrand of the 200 line. Yes, there are some improvements here and there, but it's not honestly what's been advertised (or, if not directly advertise, been put out for us to believe, whilst we await the next announcement of an announcement). And KitGuru has been a bit more vocal than some about it. Some might call it negative. Some might call it favoritism (even though they are just as hard on Nvdia, on subjects ranging from the drivers on laptops to the 970 memory kurfufle)

If AMD is letting their panties get twisted up over some honest criticism, that doesn't speak very highly for their corporate relations with the tech sites. Let's hope that their product speaks with a little more fortitude, and it isn't just provided to their fanboi sites.

[watercooled]

I've just quickly Googled the issue and some people are speculating it's down to the very limited EU sample numbers (which would make complete sense - I heard about that long before this KG issue arose) or that KG may have broken NDAs by releasing confidential information as a first source i.e. not just repeating it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/commen...over_negative/
To quote someone from that, along the lines of what I'm thinking so far:

I'm not sure KitGuru is handling this well either. Instead of saying "this is what happened, we'll follow it up, it might just be a misunderstanding with the AMD PR department", they effectively went "we are entitled to your review samples and will not be gagged".

And as others have said, it's not like they were ever going to be able to keep a sample out of their hands down the line, and it makes very little sense from an AMR PR perspective to pull a stunt like this - if they'd pulled samples from other sites I'm sure we'd know about it by now, and if it's a last-minute thing then that could tie in with the NDA-break theory?

[GuidoLS]

I've just quickly Googled the issue and some people are speculating it's down to the very limited EU sample numbers (which would make complete sense - I heard about that long before this KG issue arose) or that KG may have broken NDAs by releasing confidential information as a first source i.e. not just repeating it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/commen...over_negative/
To quote someone from that, along the lines of what I'm thinking so far:


And as others have said, it's not like they were ever going to be able to keep a sample out of their hands down the line, and it makes very little sense from an AMR PR perspective to pull a stunt like this - if they'd pulled samples from other sites I'm sure we'd know about it by now, and if it's a last-minute thing then that could tie in with the NDA-break theory?

Going simply by the posted phone conversation on KG, since AMD has not felt the need to offer a dissent, it seems that the action could be taken as vindictive -

On the 11th June AMD informed us via email that the upcoming FIJI hardware was reserved for KitGuru, as would normally be the case. We subsequently set a plan in motion to analyse the hardware for launch and were awaiting the arrival of the sample. Earlier this week I had a call from Christine Brown, Senior Manager, EMEA Communications at AMD to let me know that the company had withdrawn their sample from KitGuru labs and that we would now not be involved at all in the launch next week.

Christine Browne informed me directly on the phone that the reason for withdrawing the sample was based on ‘KitGuru’s negative stance towards AMD’. She said that with limited product they wanted to focus on giving the samples to publications that are ‘more positive’ about AMD as a brand, and company. I was not informed during this call of anything we have published that was factually incorrect, we were also not told to edit or remove any content we had published. Based on what AMD had seen via KitGuru editorial in recent weeks it was felt that overall coverage was just too negative.

I don't know if it's *THAT* cut and dried, but again, nothing official from AMD kind of leaves it with the air of yeah, we're that petty....

[watercooled]

And no reply could also be down to the fact it's still under embargo, which KG is probably also bordering on breaking with their rant. I can think of quite a few large sites with a somewhat anti-AMD tone and most of them will probably have their reviews out on release day - we'll see. It just doesn't make any sense for AMD to make a big deal about taking a sample from a fairly small site or handle in the way they're claimed to have.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFWgc8qjQwk
The irony of disabling comments.
Not sure if this video was originally released before or after the complaint but if that's the general tone of the site then it makes a bit more sense. I only clicked through a few sections but it just seems like a 13m unprofessional rant about AMD in general. I mean it's not like Nvidia would do something like rebadging cards is it?

Edit: Anyway very tired and off to bed now so forgive me if I've mangled any of those sentences!

[kalniel]

So the worrying thing here is mainly the low EU stock. Sort of expected given the very new tech, but it's never good when a flagship product is hard to find - nVidia often have the same problem with the first shots at very big die products and we call them out on that too.

[watercooled]

I'm not sure if it's down to overall stock as reviewer samples would only make up an negligible quantity anyway? It could be a timing thing I guess, flying out review samples ahead of the retail shipments so reviews are ready in time.

I'm just guessing though. I wonder if Hexus have got hold of one?

[kalniel]

I'm just guessing though. I wonder if Hexus have got hold of one?

You didn't see Tarinder's hint earlier?

[watercooled]

Nope I hadn't. Wonder what he's furious about?

[The Hand]

Nope I hadn't. Wonder what he's furious about?

He'll Be Making a review or two over such a sunny weekend I imagine. Enough to make anyone furious!