Brett Walton and Chris Arnone, VGChartz’ top dogs, will insist on telling you that “VGChartz has always been run in an ethical way and that hasn’t changed and isn’t going to change.” This week, you’ll find out that, actually, that’s not entirely true. Which is a bit ironic.

Edit: Apparently Schick is Wilkinson-Sword, not Gillette. Who knew? Well, people who use Schick and Edge, obviously. Anyway, the post has been amended with the correct company name.

In April of this year, VGChartz ran an advertising campaign with Wilkinson-Sword to promote their Edge and Schick range of products which had been branded with various PlayStation 3 titles – specifically inFamous 2, Killzone 3 and Gran Turismo 5. The site also ran some advertorials for Wilkinson-Sword promoting their products and the associated games, and even ran a competition giving away someWilkinson-Sword goodies. Isn’t that nice of them?

Most of the advertorials were flagged with “Brought To You By…” headers so that readers knew these posts were paid advertising, but that wasn’t always going to be the case.

When VGChartz Editor-in-Chief Chris Arnone informed his writing team that the ad campaign would be starting, weekend editor Joseph Jackmovich strongly advised him to mark the advertorials as bought and paid for. Arnone disagreed:

Joseph Jackmovich 5:18 pm
if that’s the case [the advertorials] should be labeled as such

Chris Arnone 5:18 pm
Nope, that’s part of it

That wasn’t all the ad deal entailed, either - one of the terms of the agreement involved not posting any negative content concerning the games involved in Wilkinson-Sword’s promotion:

Chris Arnone 5:18 pm
Like starting this week (was going to email you about it), no editorial content can speak badly of Killzone 3, GT5, or inFamous 2

Joseph Jackmovich 5:19 pm
that’s…messed up

Chris Arnone 5:19 pm
We’ve got an ad deal with that Edge/Schick promotion
That’s part of it

In a follow-up email, Jackmovich strongly suggested to Arnone and Walton that they pull out of the ad deal - sitting on negative news about three games because of an advertising campaign ran the risk of making their site look bad, especially in light of the then-recent Reddit fiasco.

Arnone eventually relented on calling the advertorials what they were, but disagreed about dropping the campaign itself:

Unfortunately, I think you’re being naive. I do think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have “Advertisement” as a story option for advertorials. However, Joe, you’re being naive about the business. This is entertainment journalism and we’re stuck trying to make money off the very industry we’re writing about.

Give a look around the gaming sites, you’ll find that Schick/Edge ad campaign all over many of these sites and we all agreed to the same thing.

It’s worth noting that VGChartz was just one of several sites running advertisements for Wilkinson-Sword - they also ran on GamePro and G4TV.com, amongst others.

[Update: The Schick ads may not actually have been running on G4 or GamePro at this time. While the ads were running on other sites (and Destructoid actually covered a technical fuck-up at the time that led to people obtaining free DLC for the promoted games), my citing of GamePro and G4 comes from a misinterpretation of a sentence in one of Chris Arnone’s emails. My apologies to anyone inconvenienced by this.]

Jakmovich continued to assert his displeasure at the decision, but Arnone shrugged it off as a normal part of game journalism, saying:

I understand you’re not comfortable with the business side of journalism, but particularly if you want to keep writing about gaming as a career, this is how it works. That said, I don’t believe we have to sacrifice our ethics. If some news post comes out ripping GT5 a new one, we won’t lie and say it’s not true, but we will just have to skip that particular story in our coverage.

Let’s just make that clear – VGChartz’ Editor-in-Chief was prepared to withhold any negative news about these games because they’d been paid to. Ethics!

At what point is that journalism? At what point does this serve their readers – y’know, the people gaming news sites are supposed to be providing impartial information for? When something like an ad campaign can lead towebsites keeping their mouths shut about bad news, they are no longer serving the public interest. They are serving their own bottom line, as well as the bottom line of the publishers and developers. That’s not journalism, and it sure as Hell isn’t ethical.

Editor-in-Chief Chris Arnone has no idea what journalism is supposed to be. In March VGChartz received a press release from the Redner Group promoting a game called Zombii Attack, as many outlets did. However rather than simply write a story about it, VGChartz’ Jared Presler decided to slightly reword the press release and claim it as his own.

Arnone approved and supported the decision, and seemed entirely unwilling to address the fact that the differences between the post and the press release were minimal at best. All he would say was that the press release was “super dry” and that Presler had “put his own spin on” the material.

Jackmovich, still weekend editor at the time, was able to delete the offending post, but not without complaint from Arnone.

Jared Presler was eventually fired from his position as a weekend news writer, but he still occasionally writes reviews for the site - such as this review of Brink that fails entirely to mention the game’s multiplayer - in exchange for the review copies. Chris Arnone looks after his friends.

Later this week, I’ll be going into some of the other shenanigans at VGChartz, ranging from the legally iffy to the morally bankrupt.