Keeping with the tradition of highly frequent blog updates, here’s another highly frequent blog update! I’m heading to San Francisco tomorrow for the illustrious Game Developers Conference, a show that brings together loads of game-industry folks and those who would someday very much like to be game-industry folks for a few days of panels, lectures, [...]
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“Public relations” isn’t “media relations,” folks. The definition of PR seems to have moved away from its literal meaning — relating to and interacting with the public. If I focus my attention on individuals — or any number of “second-tier” websites and blogs (or third-tier or fourth-tier or even the guy who only gets 3 hits a year) — I can reach a massive audience. Those individuals appreciate even a moment of your time — particularly if you’re working for a company they adore — and will become extensions of your PR efforts (not necessarily your media efforts, of course), telling their friends, Twitter followers, and everyone else about your company and its products. They want to help you succeed. Let them do that. It just takes a bit of your time. I’m going to try to put together a series of brief posts about PR practices, and thanks to my current diet of cold medication and coffee the best name I could come up with is PR Shorts. I know that sounds like a pair of cut-off jeans that will never give you a straight answer, [...] “I was reviewing a big, anticipated game in a well-known, successful franchise from a top-tier publisher. It’d gotten plenty of slobbery preview coverage from ours and other outlets in the months previous, but the final game was inescapably mediocre. So I gave it the score it deserved.” Throughout a game’s PR and marketing campaign, the publisher or developer needs to create promotional screenshots to show off a game’s visuals. It’s important to note that the final polishing of a game — those extra steps that take the game to final quality — often isn’t done until the last few months of the project. That will vary, of course, from one game to another, as some teams may aim to be “art complete” much earlier in development. Anyway, these shots will usually be created with whatever game content is available — so if a game is being announced two years before its release date, there’s a good chance that the aforementioned game content is not final, only partially available or completely non-existent. The seedy underbelly of the games industry exposes itself. When a journalist goes rebels and does something as recklessly disrespectful and anti-gaming as write a negative article about a game or publisher, a lot of PR reps and executives forget that golden rule and do something so unimaginably dumb in times of duress that I just can’t wrap my batshit insane head around it: they put that journalist on their blacklist. Everybody who’s anybody in the games industry — me being the most obvious exception — is at E3 in LA this week, shoveling their wares or having wares shoveled into them. As hoped, a lot of companies saved some big announcements and content for the show, and I’m here to crap all over their hard [...] Is PR so simple a monkey could do it? Futurama’s Gunther surely could, Clyde (I know he’s an orangutan) could probably get press for anything, beyond that, probably only a handful of other monkeys come to mind. What does that mean for our profession? Well, thanks to the ability of speech we have jobs. You see, the state of the economy is to blame for some layoffs we had to make at CD Projekt RED — we didn’t have to fire hundreds or thousands of people like a lot of other companies did, but nevertheless we were affected. Those layoffs spawned at least one disgruntled employee who felt the need to reach out to media to expose what was/is a very fragile situation in the development of The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf. I get it, social networks are all the rage (see my roundtable post coming soon.) |
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