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EA Comes Under Fire for Shady PR Stunts
EA has come under heavy fire lately for some deliberately shady PR techniques. You can't argue with the result, however, that has pretty much everyone (including us) talking about it. The question is: will extensive discussion, and the resulting widespread anger that seems to accompany it, actually help their game sales? Stunts have ranged from their "win a date with a booth babe" contest to paying game site editors a faux "bribe" to fit with their sin motif. "Outraged Christian bloggers, complaining female and LGBT gamers, editors being sent checks made out directly to them — all of this makes for delicious copy, and much of the gnashing of teeth seems to be centered on the fact that the gaming press continues to fall for the contrived controversy to give the company exactly what it wants: coverage. The campaign has been childish, daring, and borderline tasteless. Writing checks directly to game writers is cheaper than advertising on a site, with a much better result."
all of this makes for delicious copy, and much of the gnashing of teeth seems to be centered on the fact that the gaming press continues to fall for the contrived controversy to give the company exactly what it wants: coverage.
Submitter and the editor didn't actually see the ironic thing here?
For that matter I didn't actually had heard or read about this game, but thanks to slashdot now reporting about this, I think I will just google it. Just to know what it is about. Maybe I even buy it - after all everyone is talking about it. Good work Slashdot!
So what kind of game it is? Does it look good? What features are there? Is it fun? Is there multiplayer, and how is it? Is it fun to play with friends?
In the latest chapter of this fun tale, EA has finally decided to simply send editors of prominent gaming sites checks for $200. The point? If the checks are cashed, the gaming press is greedy. If they're not, the gaming press is wasteful. "By cashing this check you succumb to avarice by harding filthy lucre, but by not cashing it, you waste it, and thereby surrender to prodigality. Make your choice and suffer the consequence for your sin," the included note stated. "And scoff not, for consequences are imminent." The sin theme remains, if nothing else, on-topic.
This has to be one of the first times money has been sent directly to reviewers and editors with the hope that the story is broken publicly, and that's what makes the stunt so devious; of course it's going to be written about. Joystiq cashed the check and donated the money to charity, Kotaku posted video of their check burning. Without having a list of sites that received the faux bribe, it's impossible to tell if anyone actually cashed the check and kept the money.
Cheapy D, who runs the popular deals site CheapAssGamer, weighed in on the check. "Kotaku charges an $8 CPM (cost per 1,000 banner impressions) for their standard advertising banners. Their news post about this PR stunt will likely surpass 40,000 views," he explained. "To err on the safe side, let's say the total cost of the check and fancy box is $300. Since [the post's author] burned the check, EA basically spent the equivalent of a $2.50 CPM for a front page news post on Kotaku. That is an incredible value. Nice job, EA Marketing!"
This sounds like a fun stunt. And now it continues on slashdot too. Someone is going to get a nice christmas bonus!
"Outraged Christian bloggers"?
Boy, remind me not to get on their bad side! They may pray me to death with their eerie powers...
Trolling is a art,
It got posted to the front page of slashdot, to be discussed endlessly. Total direct cost to EA to do this - $0, assuming ScuttleMonkey wasn't a recipient of one of the $200 checks.
Why, its horrible that they are sending out money, and hot babes, and... wait, where can I sign up?
Not in general. On the radio, it's illegal unless the payment is disclosed, but that regulation's under the FCC's power to regulate radio. For general websites, newspapers, books, etc., there's no anti-payola legislation.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
this is outrageous. Please, don't fall victim to this EA marketing ploy. It is unethical and EA should be shunned for this.
Please, as a show of unity against this marketing scheme, please send me all of the $200 checks. Once I have received a substantial amount of them I will take these checks and show EA where to shove them. It's the only way we can get our point across.
If you didn't get a check and would like to make a donation to the cause, please feel free to send that to me as well.
GAMERS UNITE!
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
They are marketing a game called Dante's Inferno and they are having fun with the deadly sins. This is just good marketing, plain and simple. People objecting need to get their funny bone tweaked.
While I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, this stunt projected a view of your target demographic as lustful heterosexual males, when in reality a larger and larger portion of the gaming population are women and LGBT people.
I'm pretty sure a lesbian would be happy with that reward too. I guess they could have had two male models on hand for a gay guy/female winner, but to portray it as anti-homosexual is pretty unfair.
Not totally related but - why would you even make a 'gay gamer' site - do tastes in games really vary that much with sexual orientation? Seems like his whole job is built around being controversial and 'different'.
You do realize the bloggers are upset because EA FAKED the protested of their own game and blamed it on christian groups. Most of the 'christian bloggers' probably didn't care about the game or even know it existed until they were slamed for a protest they had nothing to do with. For once I think they actually have something to gripe about, after all the fake protests lead to people thinking exactly what you just posted, when in reality the bloggers were not the ones protesting.
If they really do protest games like that, why did EA have to stage one?
This is a self-inflicted malaise as far as the independent studios are concerned. There is absolutely no requirement to use "modern graphics" (whatever that means, I assume you are talking about ridiculously detailed models with megazillions of polygons). That is because there is absolutely no direct relationship between game play and the graphics quality. Some of the most popular games have graphics reminiscent of the 1990s or even 1980s, while some of the greatest bombs sport fancy 3D engines with programmable shaders, deformable environments and what not.
In fact this whole obsession with graphics to the exclusion of everything else seems to me very much like a hardware vendor instigated mass psychosis, helped along by the likes of EA and others who wish to achieve a strangle-hold on the gaming industry by setting up massive, artificial, budgetary "barriers to entry" for competitors. Which also happens to be a pre-requisite to cartel-forming, creation of oligopolies and finally monopolies.
Perhaps considering that EA's stunt caused you to come here and bash Christians their displeasure with EA's stunt is not as baseless and hypocritical as you suggest?
Hypocritical would be EA protesting about something violent (a war perhaps?) that the Christians (hypothetically) agree with and the Christians getting up in arms. I could not, for example,get a bunch of white southern guys, all put black-paint on my face, make a bunch of NAACP banners, and go protest the fictional arrest of some African American while acting acting as offensively stereotypical as possible and then claim African Americans are being "hypocritical" when they get outraged at my stunt.
Probably less someone getting paid based on number of sales, and more getting paid based off how much impact the people above the exec thing they had.
I've seen execs rewarded for horrible sales simply because they convinced their bosses/clients that it 'would have been so much worse if I had not done XYZ'.
EA is doing this since... well, I think they are pretty much defined by those methods.
I know that at least five years ago, the German Game magazine Gamestar was the only one not to have a story on some EA game, because they refused to rate it above 90% in order to get access to “exclusive” images etc. I think they even wrote about how EA offered them a pre-written “test” to print practically verbatim.
But this is not the only area where they are shady. If you remember the lawsuit, where the wives of EA programmers (or should I say “code monkeys”) sued EA, because their men never came home. Apparently, the internal rule was, to work until at least 8 PM, and never have free weekends or ask for holidays. If you would go home on the weekend, your boss would tell you, not to ever come back.
I also remember that everybody from Bullfrog (don’t dare to not remember them! ^^) quit the company, to found a new one, as soon as they were bought by EA. That company was again bought by EA. And that time, still 60% of the employees did quit on the spot.
Then their whole process of making games — from my perspective as a game designer — is just disgusting. It’s just like those Hollywood plastic fantastic default movies with ten writers. To them it’s just a production process. No heart, no soul, no free creativity. You just create a mass-product. Never a piece of art, how it should be. They are an insult to the whole business, dragging the reputation of us all down with them.
Now you’ve got an image of what kind of company EA is. Microsoft’s ethics are a freakin’ joke, compared to EA’s.
I wish I would be exaggerating.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The Christians are just pissed that their "moral" outrage seems to so consistently coincide with extremely popular titles.
So much so, in fact that marketing firms are now going so far as to stage 'faux Christian outrage' in the hopes that the outrage itself is the thing that contributes to the hits. This of course must be very annoying for the Christians who were hoping that the world was actually listening to what they were saying. It turns out that marketing departments haven't really been listening to the Christians at all, but instead -- happily noting the simultaneous occurance of increased revenues with the angry mobs of yammering Christians.
Which is as it should be of course. Trying to ram one's morality down the throats of others is generally regarded as poor form.
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The mind boggles. Do you seriously believe that because some Christians are vocal all Christians agree with them? Or that because some black people behave like stereotypes that it's fair to say that all black people are like that?
And yet there IS a correlation between graphics quality and the number of people willing to shell out $50 for the game.
For a disconcertingly large number of gamers, graphics quality is an indicator of game quality when making purchasing decisions -- especially for people who buy games for other people to play (parents buying for their kids, for example).
It's been true since day 1, graphics have always sold games. I believe we're at the point where the relative increase in graphics quality now is outweighed by gameplay factors, but that's just me and some others... and I don't spend more than $20/yr on games. So why would the studios care about me?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
So charge less?
I am buying the new monkey island this weekend.
That is not modern graphics, neither are the penny-arcade games.
Quite frankly $50 is too much for any game no matter the graphics. For those I wait a month till it is $40.
UFO:AI is one of the best games I have played in years and is free.
They paid writers to write about it? Isn't that like... their job?
They pretty much bribed writers to write favorable reviews. Thats why people started flocking to the internet rather than print for all their gaming reviews because just about all the paper magazines were written to have a favorable bias on some truly terrible games. No one wants to be ripped off when they buy a game, and some publications were even owned by the company that made games (such as Nintendo Power) that even went as far as to put in propaganda through the years of the evils of GameSharks and Game Genies, the evils of old ROMs and why you should always make sure that all of your games had a Seal of "Quality" on them.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.