Topic: Push Square Wants Your Game Reviews

Hey everyone,

We wanted to run this by you guys on the forum because we know how involved a lot of you are with the site in general (which is always appreciated!).

Basically, we're thinking of running a weekly or bi-weekly feature article on Push Square that's all about game reviews from users.

We'd be asking for users (just like you!) to send us very short game reviews that we could include in a regular feature article. We're thinking along the lines of just one paragraph, complete with a score out of 10. These reviews would ideally get right to the heart of why you enjoy (or dislike) a certain game. Any and all PlayStation games could be covered, but we'd probably prefer to hear your takes on more recently released games.

Does this sound like something you guys would be interested in? Your reviews would be published in the aforementioned article along with your user name, or real name if you prefer. We'd be taking submissions via email.

We like to think that the community aspect of Push Square is one of the site's best qualities, so giving you lot another avenue of expression is something we're enthusiastic about.

Let me know your thoughts — we're totally open to feedback on this, and we'd love to hear whether it's something you'd personally want to be a part of.

Thanks for reading!

Sounds like a good idea. I'd love to write something that would get published as part of a feature. I know it's just a bit of fun but it adds that little bit of esteem and recognition to what you've written.

I should be able to keep the word count down to as my economically worded ps plus reviews will attest to!

Maybe have a word count limit instead of a paragraph limit otherwise every sentence becomes a paragraph in order to accommodate disparate ideas.

Edit: mind you, I don't really play new games so maybe that will disqualify me by default 😂

Sounds like a great idea. As someone who tends not to buy the latest games and just kind of plays whatever, I think a way of incorporating reviews for older games alongside the newer releases would be good. I might be in the minority though

@ralphdibny @Kanji-Tatsumi Fair points, I know a lot of people tend to wait for newer games to go on sale now, so maybe we can keep things quite broad. I think we'd be open to reviews of older games if that's something you guys would be more enthusiastic about.

Might be good to have some transparency about the submission process as well. Will you sit on submissions and publish them as and when there is space in the feature to do so? Should a user submit the same piece multiple times in future if it doesn't get chosen for the feature that week?

I guess you won't get back to everyone who submits a piece but maybe a Submission Guide would be good to clarify these points and any more that you can think of.

To include some user content on the main site sounds as a great idea It feels in general cool when the staff engages with the forum community.

Don't really see the point of restricting it to a paragraph if it's going to feature on the main site. There's always the user impression thread in this forum if people want to post their own reviews.

@ralphdibny Yeah, we'd most likely be collecting submissions and then publishing them based on various factors like game diversity in the article, etc. Generally speaking, I think it would work like reader submissions to a magazine; we obviously couldn't guarantee that your submission would be published, but we'd welcome submissions from everyone.

And I agree, a quick overall submission guide would be useful. This would probably be added to the bottom of each user review feature article as well.

@MatthewJP I get where you're coming from, but bigger reviews would mean that we'd potentially have to edit bodies of text, and that's not really what we're going for. User submissions would have to be quick and snappy, especially if we're being sent a decent number of them.

But just to clarify, we'd be including multiple user reviews in one big article. We don't know what the number would be just yet because we'd need to gauge interest from the community, but it would be a group of reviews in each feature.

This is right up my street! You guys can't review everything for example the elder scrolls online expansions, so would be more than happy to help out. I'm out atm so will give a better comment later

@ShogunRok sounds good 👍

@ShogunRok By email you mean the contact form or? I am interested to give few reviews of my own. I am not one for lengthy reviews so it is ideal for me

I’ll basically do whatever you want

@Zuljaras We're not totally sure about the email address yet. Initially we might just get everyone to send their submissions to my work address, and if everything goes well maybe we can set up a community-focused submission address.

Once the details have been finalised (and if there's enough interest!) we'll likely do a Site News article with everything you'll need to know.

I think this is a great idea!
I do think maybe, if there’s enough interest, it would be worth categorizing it a bit, perhaps within one article or with separate articles.. Maybe one for games you’ve reviewed, one for games that you haven’t/won’t review, and one for retro games.

@ShogunRok I would love to share my experiences on Bloodborne, RE2 Remake, RE4 Remake this month and more.

As someone whose written a few user reviews when a game moves me (either positively or negatively), I’m all for this. Count me in.

I’ve often thought many of my fellow forum members’ reviews are more than worthy of actual publication. We have some excellent writers in the forums. The word limit is going to be the tricky part, but it can certainly be done. It would be good for me learn some brevity in my writing. 😅

I thought user reviews weren't allowed. I posted one in the forums of NL years ago and it got locked and I was told that they weren't allowed and only staff can do reviews. So which one is it? Are we allowed or not allowed?

@Tasuki chill, jeez!

Seems like a solid idea. As @Th3solution mentioned, there's a fair few members already typing out some pretty credible reviews on various topics in the forums, including games, so I don't see why this wouldn't work.

Along with the aforementioned user, @ralizah and @pizzamorg spring to mind as regulars who might possibly be interested. Though there's definitely others.