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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'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.
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.
Back in the day, there was a UK Amiga magazine called Amiga Power! who were vehemently against magazines being bought off for favourable reviews. They made use of the full review scale - 0% to 100% and railed against other magazines never going below 60%.
They came up with a score that would placate game publishers who were pushing for good reviews, which was the lowest that you could get away with giving without incurring their wrath - this score was 73%, and they occasionally used this score in a somewhat ironic fashion to indicate that the game was, in fact, crap, but that it was unlikely to review as such.