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PR And The Game Media, The Rockstar Way
simoniker writes "Discussing PR and the media, former Rockstar Games PR rep Todd Zuniga discusses how the company tried to manipulate the game press as part of an in-depth article on how the two forces interact: "In part, it's a numbers game... Otherwise, it's history. Who wrote negatively about the games, and who hasn't? We never worked with [gaming website] GameSpot while I was there because 'they just didn't get it.'... Hilariously, we even had a list of journalist preferences: 'Likes cake, married, went to school at Indiana U'.""
I know most of the major gaming website/magazines out there are payed in some way or another from publishers/developers/whoever, but I have found that using gamerankings.com usually helps bring things truth to light...besides, I enjoy reading reviews that are polar opposites of each other...it's similar to getting your news from different biases (left/right/whatever)...kinda helps paint you a full picture...between all the extra crap and spin thrown around from each news source, you are usually able to come up with some bit of middle ground that gives you an idea on what really happend (although that is becoming increasingly difficult)
Naturally, the best review is a play-through yourself, but that's not always viable (or wanted.) A very good way to get unbiased reviews is to look up personal opinions on various websites such as Amazon, Rottentomatoes, etc...
Living With a Nerd
The past tense of pay is paid, in the same way the past tense of say is said. You wouldn't use "she sayed", would you?
Did we (even those without tinfoil hats) know this already? Isn't that why we never read the cheapo magazines, but bought it for the CDs with demos/useful utilities when we were on dialup? I think we all read game mags with a critical eye - especially articles pimpin' a game or a product. So why is this news?
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
I've worked for two well-known gaming journalism groups, and I can tell you that game developers don't have quite as much control over the content of feature articles as this article might have you suspect.
The principled difference between an advertisement and a feature story is that a company has control over the content of the ad, and that the advertisements are usually handled by the entity producing the game, not the developers.
Developers may control the spigot of game-related information, but they don't control the spigot attached to the gaming press' fingers and mouths. Editor impressions, exclusive previews, and game reviews are all written by the editors of the press outlets, and we get paid by our company, not by the software developers, to write these things. We really do want to help you save money by pointing out which games are worth your time and money.
All of these are elements are effective at providing a check against any potentially slanted information that a company may try to use to artificially spike its product's popularity, and believe me - they get called on this very quickly when it inevitably fails.
Inserting [insert witty signature here] here does not constitute a witty signature.
"Hilariously, we even had a list of journalist preferences: 'Likes cake, married, went to school at Indiana U'."""
In the world of PR/Politics, that's neither uncommon, nor stupid. In fact, it's one of the better methods of easing the personal parts of the job.
I might be some strange freak but I never read reviews on games or movies before I play or buy them. Why? because they are often laced with mild spoilers and tainted you by setting up or bringing down your expectations. They point out "flaws" you may not have cared about or noticed until they did this or they might be useless fluff. Similiarly I avoid trailers. I do read them after I have played them. But more often to see how others felt about what I liked/disliked. If I went to see Borne ultamatium I want to see reviews afterwards to see if others had the same impression i did. Sort of a anonymous one sided water cooler conversation. If I hated it I'd like to see others savage the movies/game. If I loved it I want to see what others liked or disliked about it.
I find I'm occsionally disappointed by spending when I shouldn't have (child of mana) but on the flip side I get gems that fit my gaming needs I might have otherised passed up due to low review scores (Izuna).
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Seriously, he just drew a bunch of pictures of bunnies, exclamation points, and boxes. They don't seem to relate to the story whatsoever.
"Now I'm seriously serious!" - Serious Sam
Only those people under the age of 14 might not have figured out that the game magazines are all propped up fronts for the game companies. And it isn't just the magazines. Many of the on-line sites are just as guilty of sucking the tail-pipes of the game publishers.
Every month a game magazine manages to come up with some "hot new title". Yet how many games each year are actually good? Yeah, I thought the same thing.
For a while there I was receiving a copy of Computer Game World for unknown reasons. (I didn't subscribe to it, and never paid for it.) Each edition promptly tried to blow smoke up my ass about how (title x) was going to be the greatest game ever.
Sadly, this works, especially with spoiled kids that have clueless parents. "Look, Mom! This game was given UBER scores by this game magazine. Everyone will have it! I NEED it!" And the darn parent will buy it, because it was reviewed as worthy.
The game companies count on people being lemmings. And all to many game players fall into that category. Regardless of how bad a game is, if someone tells the gamer it's a hot title, they will buy it, and then talk it up because they don't want to look stupid.
Even without manipulation on the part of developers, I still have a hard time completely believing reviews. The simple reason for this is that most reviewers don't have to pay for and live with the product they're reviewing. These publications get these games for free and they often come extras to make the package more enticing. Granted, unlike many other products these guys still have to actually play through the game.
It's like those supposed long-term reviews of cars. Except that the car is constantly being driven by a different person. So if the car ends up having some problem nobody notices it because no one has to depend on the car for the duration of the review. And on top of that in their case the dealer always agrees to repair everything and replace anything free of charge. So in the end they produce an overly positive review which is worthless.
Needless to say, gaming publications aren't quite on the same level. However, when it comes down to it the $50-$60 didn't come out of their own pocket. They're not stuck with a disappointing game. That in and of itself ensures an overly favorable impression of the game. Given everything developers supply reviewers with I have a hard time believing they will ever be as critical as they should be. Even if it isn't blatant the influence exists.
It's still a waste of time.
What would be more efficient (not necessarily more entertaining) is something like "Reviewer A who liked A,B,C very much also liked X", and say one paragraph of comments. And if lots of "reviewers" who have similar tastes to you liked X and their one paragraph is intriguing enough, you are very likely to like X.
I claim that even though there are 6 billion people in the world, the groups of computer game (or movie) preferences are a lot fewer.
Say we have a system where each registered user of the system can be a reviewer and create their own reference groups of reviewers (to even things out), then they could look for "great ridge racer like" games if they are feeling like one, or "Yet Another Military FPS".
In fact, if someone is flexible, they could put on different hats and create multiple reviewing accounts for each "persona" they wish to assume.
It doesn't matter to the users if that "reviewer" does that, since they can ignore reviewers whose preferences don't match theirs. You still have to try to limit the number of accounts a single user can have, otherwise if 90% of the reviewers are of one real life malicious user, that user could one day suddenly review a new game differently/unexpectedly on purpose, and odds are 90% of their reference group would be reviewers created by that person.
Of course professional reviewers will hate this, since you don't even need to be able to write a coherent paragraph, as long as you consistent like/dislike stuff, in a way that's similar to a lot of people, people could still use you as a guide.
With this method you could even have a dog or other animal review games, food etc.
I buy a new Ridge Racer (the recent versions I own are the DS version, the first PSP version, and the PS3 version) from time to time, and I wish they'd fix the stupid "I'm on rails and can drift around a corner backwards while doing a 360" crap.
As part of the effort to personalize, Rockstar's PR department tracked scores for reviewers on a person-by-person basis, often hoping to influence which writers were selected to review their games. "Rockstar was big on trying to get specific people to review specific games," says Zuniga. "But it's a fine line--you can't just come out and ask, because it seems like you're trying to take away editorial control." They went so far as to track seemingly pointless personal details of some writers. "Hilariously, we even had a list of journalist preferences: Likes cake, married, went to school at Indiana U. Shit like that," says Zuniga. "It was a weird f*cking place to work."
In the end, the efforts never earned the kind of scores head honchos wanted. "The score would never live up to the expectation," says Zuniga. "If it scored a 99, the expectation was for every other review to be 100." What the higher-ups wanted was what business tends to want: predictability, something that can be planned and executed. "They wanted to feel comfort," says Zuniga. "They wanted to know that when we went to Company A and talked with Person B that we could expect result C." As the article goes on to say, PR efforts can be actively counter-productive: Veteran Laura Heeb Mustard says that, in the end, blackballing isn't an effective strategy for a publicist--that, in fact, it's bad PR. "While there are many ways to attempt to persuade a journalist to hold on a story, one way I would not recommend is by trying to bully them into not reporting the item," says Mustard. "While there are some outlets that may retreat in fear of being cut off, there are others that will retaliate against your threats. Now, they're in a position of scooping your news--with the added bonus of a juicy story about how you tried to strong-arm them. We've seen a number of different cases of this recently, and quite frankly, in each case there are more effective strategies that could have been applied."
Often, she says, such strong-arm tactics are not born in the PR department, but further up the chain of command, where executives have less experience in the trenches with the media and more power to wield. "While it may be the PR person that is ultimately tasked with carrying out the threat, you should dig deeper into where the actual threat is coming from. I bet it's from someplace in management," says Mustard. "Execs have a hard time reading bad press because they very quickly see the negative impact of it. And because they usually have the authority to do so, they often come down on PR to either 'fix the problem' or to punish the outlet. However, because they aren't involved in day-to-day media relations, they often fail to see the long term negative impact of retaliation against the media."
Arr! Read The Government Manual for New Pirates!
The final reviews, if they happen before release at all, only precede it by mere days. Why not just run a site where you wait for software to come out, buy it and review it without ever contacting the company in question. They have no business collaborating in the first place. Roger Ebert doesn't sit on the set of Spielberg's latest movie making notes for the man. Movie sites usually talk about who's involved in a project, but that's pretty much where it ends. You then judge this movie by your interest in its stars and its creators, which is based on their previous finished work. You usually don't hear some inside jerk discussing the "dailies" and portenting disaster on a movie that has barely begun the birthing process. It's just not a productive activity.
The game press could learn something else from Hollywood. They've got the whole demand equation backwards. Movies beg for publicity. Game companies are supposed to come to the game press for hype. They need buzz more than game magazines need the story. Maybe the problem originates in the readership. Why do we care so much about a game's early development, especially when titles slip their original intended release dates, sometimes by as much as years, and often come out as complete catastrophes making the whole process of prolonged anticipation a really ridiculous affair in retrospect. I'm looking at you, Advent Rising.
I review games for the Adrenaline Vault site, and I must say even I do not know how the whole thing works. I get sent my assignments, I play the game for a while, then write the review and send it to my editor. He hacks out the critical parts, and posts some bland version of my usually critical work. Although I am often given choices as to what games to review I have no idea why the choices that are presented in front of me are there in the first place. I certainly have no contact with any developer or advertiser.
Some of the games I have been playing lately are so bad, they numb the mind, and I cannot imagine ANYONE caring about them at all. Then there are the reviews I am asked to write about games that came out in April... Tin Hat Wearing types could take that and run with it.
We would still give lousy scores to lousy games, because to us the most important element of our work is the trust of our readership.
That is clever side stepping, such extreme cases are unrealistic. What is realistic is that when something is a wobbler, there be a temptation to give the developer/advertiser the benefit of the doubt, a review score of 9.0 instead of 8.9 for example. Such "inflations" are not detectable by the readership, they are within the normal error of human reviews, so your credibility and livelihood is not endangered as you suggest. However a marginally higher review will translate into increased sales and a better relationship with the developer/advertiser. The reward is far greater than the risk. I'd say that ethics, not economics, is the only real impediment to a scenario like the one I just described.