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Warner Bros. Settles FTC Charge For Not Disclosing Payments To YouTubers For Positive Reviews (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Federal Trade Commission has reached a settlement with Warner Bros. over claims that the publisher failed to disclose that it had paid prominent YouTubers for positive coverage of one of its video games. The FTC charge stated that Warner Bros. deceived customers by paying thousands of dollars to social media "influencers," including YouTube megastar PewDiePie, to cover Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor without announcing that money had changed hands. Under the terms of the agreement, Warner Bros. is banned from failing to disclose similar deals in the future, and cannot pretend that sponsored videos and articles are actually the work of independent producers. Warner Bros.' deal with the influencers involved stated that they had to make at least one tweet or Facebook post about the game, as well as produce videos with a string of caveats to avoid showing it in a negative light. Those videos could not express negative opinions about the game or Warner Bros. itself, could not show any glitches or bugs, and must include "a strong verbal call-to-action to click the link in the description box for the viewer to go to the [game's] website to learn more about the [game], to learn how they can register, and to learn how to play the game," according to Ars Technica. Influencers were advised to disclose the video's sponsored status under YouTube's "Show More" section, but some did not, and the FTC says this would not have been enough to skirt the rules anyway, as the disclaimer would not have been visible on videos watched through Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sources.
Why is the onus on WB for not disclosing it? Shouldn't that be the responsibility of the person reviewing the game?
there does seem to be some lack of ethics in gaming these days
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
... at the Indy 500 (Captain Benjamin L. Willard - Apocalypse Now)
Isn't this another form of payola? Isn't the principal the same, where a company influences people promoting a product with money? I don't see the difference between a 1950's DJ pushing a song after getting paid by the record company while the listener doesn't know it's being promoted and a 2016 overenthusiastic Internet reviewer getting paid by the company making the product while the reader doesn't know it's being promoted. Same marketing mechanism, same ethical problem, same net result.
Of course, you know paying online reviewers will never be made illegal because politicians are now doing this in droves!
Break the law, the punishment is to promise you won't do it again.
beaning using copyrights / dmca to remove bad reviews as well?
Oh but next time the SEC will throw the book at them.... Which book is the question... My guess is the "pass book" or maybe the offensive play book for the local High School Junior Varsity football team.
Actually, consider this a warning ticket for speeding. Next time we will write you up the broken taillight. Drive safe WB..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The funny thing here is that paying for this pre-release coverage was probably unnecessary for this game anyway. Shadow of Mordor was a pretty decent game, which received good reviews across a wide range of outlets and good feedback from players. It wasn't a ground-breaking game, or even a stunning example of its genre. But it was well put-together, competently executed and made good use of its licence. It basically took the open-world elements from the Ubisoft/Far Cry template, mixed them with the combat from the Batman: Arkham games and added a new twist with the Nemesis system (which imbued procedurally generated enemies with a degree of character and allowed for some neat emergent storytelling).
Moreover, it released at a time when the games line-up for the PS4 and XB1 was, around a year after their launch, still very disappointing. Aside from a handful of launch-exclusives, their lineups were mostly composed of games initially developed for the PS3/360 and hastily ported across to the new hardware, or outright messy failures like Watch_Dogs. Compared to these, Shadow of Mordor was a very attractive proposition.
I suspect WB resorted to "dirty tricks" because their cack-handed pre-release marketing of the game had managed to create unnecessarily bad publicity for it. A pre-launch trailer which implied an outright rip-off of Assassin's Creed (which actually misrepresents Shadow of Mordor quite considerably) and a failure to communicate what the Nemesis system was particularly well had given rise to low expectations.
But those don't have to be fatal for a game. The new Doom launched against a backdrop of rock-bottom expectations, following a troubled development and a poorly received multiplayer public beta. However, when the game hit shelves, it quickly won both critical and public praise for its singleplayer campaign and has been a sales success. Other games have also overcome low expectations to become commercial and critical successes; South Park: The Stick of Truth was another fairly recent example. The gaming scene is relatively forgiving in this sense; week 1 sales are only a small part of the picture and a good game will usually get the sales it deserves over time.
So chances are that WB here have managed to take a self-inflicted wound for marketing dirty tricks over a game which would have done just fine without them.
And hell, even before this... I sure don't recall a lot of outrage over Jeff Gerstmann being fired from GameSpot for giving Kane and Lynch: Dead Men a bad review. (As in, the review was that the game was bad, not that it was a substandard review.)
OK, try this. Go discuss review embargos and payola and other AAA corruption on a bunch of game news websites' forums or article comments and see how many censor the discussion, much less ban your account.
Now go back to the same sites and try to discuss Nathan Grayson or Patricia Hernandez and see how much censorship and ban hammerage and pure venom you encounter, by contrast.
Also notice that Gerstmann's Kane&Lynch firing was somehow not subject to a week-long, industry-wide news blackout in hopes it would go away. And that the people reporting on it weren't called harassers or mysogynists or terrorists in an attempt to intimidate them and distract from the criticism.
It is the behavior of the press that is the difference. The long-running popularity of Gamergate is the response to the gaming press's long-running cover up of journalistic corruption and smear campaign against gamers. "It's about misogyny and harassment!" is the real tired cliche.
One fine point to remember is that gamers weren't truly angry and forming a widespread movement immediately after the initial journalistic corruption was exposed. There was still some good faith that the news sites involved had the shred of integrity needed to take responsibility and clean up their own houses.
Gamergate only exploded after the cover-up, week-long universal blackout, and finally the launch of the (still ongoing) smear campaign on August 28, 2014 (a.k.a. "Gamers Are Dead" day). None of that appalling gaming press behavior has happened with other corruption stories, so there's nothing for Gamergate to do about them. They have a chance at getting proper coverage anyway.
In the unlikely event that almost every gaming site censors discussion of (for example) AAA review embargos, enacts a news media blackout (a bit late for that), and then begins slandering anyone who even mentions the embargos as misogynists, harassers, and terrorists, then (and only then) maybe another Gamergate-type customer revolt will be needed.
No. Because GamerGhazi is built on a tissue of lies. And worse, they paid virtually no attention to this particular scandal, adding even more proof that it was mostly about the gaters' misogyny.
Look at you, still clinging desperately to the "mysogyny and harrassment" narrative and trying to ignore what GG accomplished.
Gamergate campaigned to inform the FTC of this kind of unethical behavior, and the FTC got involved as far back as December 2014 in direct response to Gamergate pressure, and Gawker was forced update their disclosure policy (and tons of articles that were then clearly in violation). And the FTC also updated their disclosure guidelines several times, including last summer (guess who was running an ethics campaign asking for exactly that?):
http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/38gocf/ethics_major_ftc_update_the_ftc_has_updated_their/
The section of the FTC's website that deals with disclosures was updated late last month:
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advic...
Some of this new guidance directly reflects the language and particulars of the concerns GamerGate asked the FTC to address.
"Is "affiliate link" by itself an adequate disclosure? What about a "buy now" button?"
Consumers might not understand that "affiliate link" means that the person placing the link is getting paid for purchases through the link. Similarly, a "buy now" button would not be adequate
Does this guidance about affiliate links apply to links in my product reviews on someone else’s website, to my user comments, and to my tweets?
Yes, the same guidance applies anytime you endorse a product and get paid through affiliate links.
The revised webpage contains a great deal more language that needs to be analyzed but these two examples in particular reflect specific complaints GamerGate had about how Gawker Media handle their affiliate link disclosures. I know of no other group of people who were vocally complaining about this specific practice to the FTC. In addition, the FTC emails from my previous posts confirm that, yes, the FTC tailored part of their new guidance because of frequent complaints sent by GamerGate.
If you read further, there is specific language about requiring Let's-Players to disclose as well. And then there are the many, many sites that have updated their ethics policies. It's shameful that you will lie about an entire group of people because you and the press want to pretend that GG isn't the driving force behind all this ethics reform.
P.S. /r/GamerGhazi is an anti-Gamergate cesspool, so of course it is based on lies. But you already knew that.
P.P.S. Yes, Gamergate paid plenty of attention to this scandal. You did know that it was leaked by TotalBiscuit (during a time period when anti-GG was relentlessly shitting on him), right?
Hey gamergaters, those youtubers you love so much aren't paragons of virtue and transparency. Hell they're less ethical than formally trained journalists. You're better off reading the magazines than following some hyperactive Eurotrash guy for supposed reviews. Even Yahtzee of ZeroPunctuation isn't actually a good reviewer. "Fuck shit cock wanker bollocks yet another penis joke from a misanthrope, ramblings about those crappy UK Dizzy games, glastonbury branston pickle" may be funny, but it doesn't make a good review.
And now every Dudebro out there wants to be the next TotalJerkass, PeePeeDie or ImrichenoughtobuyaYacht-see.
Well Bollocks on that you wankers.... I hate everything except crappy UK platformers written for crappy hardware without good sound chips or proper disk drives. Now let me promote a crappy physics game starring a kielbasa written by some 19 year old aspie in Warsaw who thinks he's the next Notch, when he's really the next John Romero.
People had been pointing out for years that this kind of shilling was likely going on, but it was always considered "tinfoil" until proof started coming out. It was the same way with Snowden's disclosures. Now, I'm more inclined to believe the following: Whatever devious, twisted, subversive shilling scheme you can think of... someone else is probably already doing it.
What's that you knew they where paid good reviews because all the other reviews especially the bad ones are taken down by dmca notices?
Under the terms of the agreement, Warner Bros. is banned from failing to disclose similar deals in the future