The publicist for the long-awaited Duke Nukem Forever video game isn’t too thrilled that the video game reviewers of the world haven’t crowned the game as the greatest thing since the wheel. But instead of internalizing his frustration or making whispered threats and promises to reviewers, he went ahead and Tweeted to the entire world that overly negative reviewers would be in jeopardy of not receiving review copies of games in the future.

Last night, PR company The Redner Group wrote the following on its Twitter account:

“too many went too far with their reviews…we r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom”

There are currently 33 reviews of the Xbox 360 version of the game on Metacritic, with only one deemed “positive,” with the remainder almost equally divided between “mixed” and “negative.”

Video game reviewers generally depend on publicists to send pre-release copies of a game so that they can play it enough to write a thorough review by a game’s release date. So if a PR company wanted to, it could restrict review copies to only those reviewers it believes will laud the game, leaving all others to wait to get their copies at retail.

After drawing an immediate and overwhelmingly negative reaction from the internet, Redner took to Twitter again to issue this apology:

I have to apologize to the community. I acted out of pure emotion. I will be sending each of you a private apology.

Duke Nukem’s PR Threatens To Punish Sites That Run Negative Reviews [Wired]

Thanks to RevancheRM for the tip!

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