In the comments of the NOVA 3 review CptQuint brings up a point that I personally feel has some validity and could use some discussion: Thoughts?
Haven't paid for a single of the 3 front page posts my games have gotten. Also - their reviews are long enough, the forums will obviously have more information since an 8 page review of Angry birds space wouldn't interest me at all. TA wants you to engage in the discussions on the forums. The more engaged you are the more you return and the more you return the better ratings, ad displays and what have you TA gets. That whole quote is a load of BS.
I wouldn't disagree that the reviews are pretty cookie-cutter, but show me a successful review site (doesn't have to be iOS) for which that term doesn't apply. The times that I've seen a more unique style, it tends to be very niche and oftentimes it's from a blogger or something. It's no surprise that it's easier to reach a larger audience with a more standard approach to writing. I'm not sure what the guy has against the forum links in reviews. A long time ago, when it wasn't standard for TA reviews to contain a link to the forum thread, I almost made a suggestion that every review should have said link. Sometimes it can be annoying to try to dig around for a specific game's thread while not knowing how many pages you'll have to search through. Vbulletin's less than stellar search capabilities don't help much either.
I can clarify a couple of the points raised: The TouchArcade game reviewers are not given any instructions on what to write in our reviews. We're free to express our own opinions. The editors do review our submitted reviews, but their edits are for English improvements, not applying any "agenda". And there are no constraints placed upon us to give TA advertisers better reviews. Do we refer to the TouchArcade forums? Hell yes. The forums are an excellent source of IOS gaming information and we're proud of them. Some of the TA members know heaps about games, and the developers are often active participants, so of course we refer to the discussion threads. Plus, as a regular forum reader myself, it's handy to have a link for jumping into the discussions, as Dazarath mentioned. As for PR releases - these might bring a game to our attention, but most of the time they're not circulated to all reviewers, so we're not working off those!
I deleted that comment because we're not going to promote conspiracy theories. If you have any questions on our advertising and editorial policies, we've got them all spelled out here: http://toucharcade.com/toucharcade-advertising-and-editorial-policies/ If you still don't trust our editorial integrity, this guy has put together an entire spreadsheet of basically every other iOS site out there.
