Yes, I recently started hanging around here.

To be honest, I couldn't get care less about ethics in gaming journalism. Some of the people here are borderline tin foil hat conspiracist. They draw lines from Twitter followers and come to conclusions. I don't think anyone would give someone else's game a good score because they are friends, at the very least it would be impossible to prove. However, disclosure can only be a good thing and ethically, yes, if I called myself a journalist the right thing to do would be to not cover games of people I have conflicts of interest with at all. I think the bigger problem is, whether money changes hands behind back doors or not is irrelevant because again it's impossible to prove and it creeps paranoia territory but giving people you know coverage priority. I think waging a holy war under a twitter hashtag is pretty cringey but I tend to line up with most people's opinion here and I get my game reviews from multiple places as to make up my own mind so whatever. I'm only here because I'm salty about the way conversations have been going at Giant Bomb forums. They recently hired a new editor and he's been derailing the conversation ever since, right off the bat, talking about the perceived lack of diversity in Witcher 3 and some bullshit about colonialism. Giant Bomb always felt safe to me from all those conversations but of course good 'old Klepek took a giant dump right in the middle of the forum section before he left off so anyone who goes against the grain is now considered "non-progressive." I just wish we could go back to talking about video games without all this politics bullshit and someone accusing me of wanting to go back to the "good old days of "sexist" video games".

/r