When you start out writing in the games industry you don’t go straight to IGN, GameSpot or Eurogamer. You usually start out writing for your own blog, a shoddily put together website with a banner that’s just a little too low-res for its own good and a logo you slapped together in MS Paint. You start building a substantial amount of work which you’ll send around only to get the reply, “Sorry, we’re not looking for work right now.”
What do you do instead? You can’t afford to keep buying games and reviewing them. It takes a lot of time, effort and money which you could be putting towards something else. You want to work in the industry, but you can’t keep doing it in your current condition. That’s when you join Brash Games. (Or a site like ICXM, but this article is about the vile, shady practices of Brash Games so just roll with it.)
Brash Games—like us and many other small-scale sites—works on a volunteer basis. This means that the writers they employ ninety-nine times out of a hundred don’t get paid for their work. They get the review code, they write the review, done. Sometimes in ICXM’s case they even write news stories, interviews, etc., but Brash Games is nearly exclusively review focused.
This entire process is usually just a stepping stone in someone’s career until either them or the volunteer site evolves into a state where they get paid. I’m someone who has been in that position for over a year now at ICXM, and I very much enjoy this stage in my career.
This stage is meant for you as a writer to build a portfolio and improve. You’ll be contacted to write about anything from the low-tier indies to AAA games like Resident Evil 7 or Breath of the Wild. You write these pieces and use them as evidence to bigger, paying companies that you are a capable writer that can work efficiently for them. The proof of you doing this work? The writer’s byline.
A byline is the line at the start or end of the article which states the author of the piece.
Meg Bethany Read, a writer for Switch Player and The Daily Star, exposed Brash Games yesterday on Twitter—along with numerous other writers—for shady practices including the removal of multiple writers’ bylines.
Luckily ya girl saves her emails pic.twitter.com/NLqx5hME9j
— Meg Bethany Read (@triforcemeg) April 6, 2017
Meg Bethany Read is a bigger writer than some who work for Brash Games, but the removal of her byline is disgusting all the same. Other writers including Olly Smith have had their bylines removed by Brash in the past with Smith’s review of the hugely popular Breath of the Wild now being “written by Brash Games”.
@triforcemeg Here’s what my BOTW review looks like now vs the PDF file I saved of it when it got published. pic.twitter.com/4CUCgV82jr
— Olly Smith 🇪🇺 (@OllyWrites) April 7, 2017
Somehow, over the course of the day, Brash Games’ situation got even worse. They initially issued a hastily written statement claiming that every single writer who had been discredited from their work was a result of their WordPress CMS. The response to this was not good. With WordPress being a hugely popular backend for hundreds of thousands of websites, many called out Brash for lying. The statement was quickly removed.
Things have only got worse over the course of the last twenty-four hours. Brash was outed for terrible communication with its writers. The website allegedly responds only with more review codes, doesn’t give any form of feedback and, when writers announce their leave, never responds with anything, not even a “good luck” message. Then the worst part happened.
Josh Robertson, the owner of Flash Reviews, has accused Brash Games of tampering with his review score. There are two things that separate writers from one another; a critic’s opinions and their overall style of writing are what makes them stand out from the crowd. Metacritic and OpenCritic then collate these scores and give you a roundabout average of what people are saying to give you a rough estimate of a product’s worth.
Well I was suppose to announce that I’m writing for @BrashGames but they’ve forcibly changed my score on the first review I did sooo…
— Josh Robertson (@ReviewsFlash) March 31, 2017
A review score is a writer’s opinion, but it seems Brash Games didn’t care about that. When Josh Robertson wrote his first review for Brash, they “forcibly changed” his score to be more in line with the game’s overall score on Metacritic. A site that contributes to the Metacritic score of video games changed their review so that it matched other critic’s scores. This part actually boggles the mind.
Just when you thought Brash Games couldn’t get worse, it turns out they don’t even proof read the work of their writers. Ben McCurry’s review of Pac-Man 256 publicly outed Brash Games’ disgusting attitude towards their writers and awarded the website and owner a 1/10 for their shady practices. As many writers would agree, the pay doesn’t matter to those who are starting out, it’s the exposure, enjoyment, and practice. In the words of Olly Smith, “No pay AND no exposure” won’t get writers flocking to your website.
For this article we reached out to Meg Bethany Read and Olly Smith, and while I couldn’t find a way to fit their replies into such a hefty wall of text, I believe their words should be put here anyways.
“I think it’s disgusting how they haven’t apologised,” Read told us. “Just blocked/unfollowed thousands of people without so much as a word. All we want is an apology and an explanation as to why they did this to us.”
“This Brash Games incident has been a long time coming. It’s about time publications realized the hard work of writers cannot be exploited like this,” Smith added.
I hope that this example shows other websites that writers aren’t just tools to use. We here at ICXM respect our writers and their opinions, which is why occasionally you’ll see two opinion pieces showing different sides of the same argument. If you’re going to do one thing for your writers, at least give them exposure and treat them with respect. Don’t be like Brash Games. Although, for everything that Brash Games did wrong, they might have the most accurate name of any games website.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.