Welcome to Player Select, where we take a subject of topical gaming discussion and give it to four of our writers to attack from different angles.
For this round we’ll be discussing Good Old Games’ recent PR snafu. Was it stupid for the company to fake their own death just to get publicity for their new changes? Or was it a viable marketing tactic to get people interested about great new GOG services?
Click on a player to select:
Player 1 — Dan Rosenthal
Maybe some people have forgotten the days when respect was the most important thing in business. Back in the day of the traveling salesman and professional career sales clerk, there was an art and honor to respecting your clients. You knew their names, you knew their families, you knew what their long-term goals were and what they wanted, and you took care of them. More importantly, if you screwed up, you apologized. Not with lip service, but with a bottle of scotch in the mail and a sincere heart-felt apology. You did this, because your customers were your lifeblood.
Apparently GOG has forgotten these days, because their recent actions have exhibited an atrocious lack of respect for their customers. These tens of thousands of people, who have spent their hard-earned money on games specifically with GOG, allowing it to become a well-known name, they have feelings, and emotions — and GOG slapped them in the face and said “We don’t care, our flashy publicity stunt is more important than being honest with the people who got us where we are today”. That’s bullshit of the worst kind.
Player 2 — Jon Ruggiero
Sure, the heads of GOG should be scolded for what they did. It was stupid and random, and the community and people who plugged money into GOG didn’t deserve to have the rug pulled out from under them. But in the end, I have to commend Marcin and Michal for what they’ve done to and for Good Old Games.
The new features they’ve put in place are very community-driven. The GOGmixes — community-created lists of related games — are a great way to get like-minded people and games together. Then there are the community-written product pages, ensuring that you hear about the laurels of a game straight from the gamers that play them. They’ve made sure to make the community a much bigger part of their site. It seems to me like the new features they’ve implemented are their way of apologizing to the community.
Again, this was a very stupid way to go about things, something many of us would never do. But you can’t deny that it was an effective way of exposing the new Good Old Games service. I just hope they haven’t scared away the people the new site is meant for.
Player 3 — Justin Massongill
Good Old Games has been lambasted by nearly everyone since they pulled this stunt, and rightly so. However, it seems that what they’ve really done here is figure out how to take advantage of a predictable and oftentimes manipulatable system — games journalism.
Knowing full well that sites would pick up on this news and race to be the first one to post it, they issued a vaguely-worded release that led the gaming industry to believe they were shutting down. Nobody likes to hear about this sort of thing happening, so we all put on our “Oh, look what happened to that poor company” faces (as we do when any game company shuts down) and we shed a single tear for them. Naturally, when it came to light that the whole thing was an underhanded trick to get people to pay attention to them, we grabbed our pitchforks and wrote angry things on the internet (though I doubt the majority of us genuinely cared in the first place). Unfortunately, their ruse had already played out exactly as they wanted it to.
Good Old Games looks like a neat service, but this fiasco has cemented — in my mind — a strong desire to not support them. I hope they think it was worth it.
Player 4 — Peter Silk
Sometimes you see something happen, a decision made that must have gone through several people and you just have to marvel that nobody thought “Hang on, maybe this is shit.” Or if they did, nobody said anything.
This is one of those situations, and Justin is absolutely right to point out that it’s highly exploitative to use the media to do your marketing for you. Unfortunately this sort of thing goes on all the time in all forms of journalism. Next time you see a newspaper article along the lines of ‘Scientists discover the formula for the perfect [insert thing here]‘, check who commissioned the ‘study’ and note that it’s highly unlikely any actual science was done at all.
It’s not just the companies involved that should be slapped on the wrist, however. It’s also the responsibility of journalists to be vigilant when reporting this thing, making sure to report news rather than PR.
In the case of Good Old Games, it’s difficult to blame the journalists too much. This news came from a company with a good reputation doing what many people find to be really admirable work in keeping old classics alive. But while the rug was well-and-truly pulled out from under us, very early on as the story developed there were background rumblings that it may be a PR stunt. For future reference, that’s the point to contact GOG again for comment, making it absolutely clear that we do not consider it our job to promote their site.
Am I the only person on the planet who wasn’t possessed by a twisted rage beast from the Thirteenth Ring of Entitlement Fury when I heard about this news?
I don’t even think what they did was stupid, or harmful. How the fuck did anyone have to suffer from the stunt? I can’t download my games for a day? It can’t be that, that’s far too irrational. I don’t want to create some kind of strawman to argue against either, so I’ll just have to admit that I don’t understand it.
Also, is no-one going to praise them for at least taking a risk?
…
Eh, I think it was a dumb move by GOG but I think it’s gone to show how predictable and frankly terrible most gaming blogs are, that everyone was so quick to report that they had closed down without bothering to really look into it. “Shit guys, something’s happened! Sod the details, just get an article up ASAP! Huh? I dunno, something about old games. Who cares, write something!”.
Either way, I didn’t use the service before and I probably won’t use it now, but that’s got nothing to do with this (albeit very poor) publicity stunt. Other sites, developers and publishers have done worse in the past.
@UglyDuck: It’s not about whether it’s directly harming anyone, it’s about whether it’s a dick move, whether it’s ethical to get media publicity by essentially faking a news story. Sure, nobody got hurt, but the fact remains GOG got media coverage they couldn’t have paid for, through -dishonesty-.
@Peter Silk: As much as I tentatively agree with that – I hate and am very vocal about false or misleading advertising – I think what bugs me is the cynicism of yourself and people with a similar stance. I’ve heard phrases like ‘lying’ and ‘manipulation’ and ‘disrespect’ bandied around like this was some maniacal plan brewed up in a volcano lair.
I think the guys at GoG just thought this was a big fun joke. I think they saw it as a pantomime. As Rick Rolling. And it seems very disingenuous to pass it off as shady or dishonest business practice. Especially when you go to the extreme of saying “we’ll they just lost themselves a customer” when the service their offering is still a good one – at which point it shouldn’t matter if they fuck up a little bit. Correction – it should matter, but it shouldn’t negatively impact your choices.
But even if I admit that you’re all probably right by ad-populum or whatever the phrase is that means there’s a lot of you so you’re statistically more likely to be right, they have apologised and it seems unnecessary to continue to scold them for it…
@UglyDuck: The thing is, I’m not a cynical person. At all. I don’t usually like cynical people, they tend to think they know it all. While it might, -might- be true that I jumped the gun saying it was an exploitative publicity stunt, it is a very plausible explanation, one with a lot of precedent (I even gave an example of where else it happens). That doesn’t seem so cynical to me.
But even if I’m wrong about that, even if it was just supposed to be a fun joke, I completely stand by my assertion that it seems amazing/incompetent that -nobody- at GOG thought ‘hang on, this might make us look like dicks’
I still intend to support GOG – in fact, I bought my first games on there last week when I was exploring their new site. But I do wish I’d have been able to do it under nicer circumstances.
I’m not questioning whether or not it’s plausible. It’s highly likely that they thought this would be good publicity, in fact I’m certain they thought that. That’s the reason they did it. But they probably thought the reaction would be “oh you playful scamps and your shenanigans, you right proper fooled us, you did! Here, have some page views and don’t ever do it again.” And I think that’s the attitude we should have had, by and large.
When I say cynicism, I mean the line of thinking that leads calling them dicks, as opposed to regular guys who fucked up.
Incidentally, I’m not responding to you specifically Peter, but the nebulous rabble of people who think a certain way, so when I say cynical, it isn’t necessarily directed at you. :)
@UglyDuck: I’m sorry, but there’s no way any professional marketing team would see this as anything less than a dick move. If you pay attention to gaming’s social existence at all, you can see how reactions to this sort of stunt turn out. They knew what they were getting into.
@Justin Massongill: …I’m going to point to Rick Rolling. Also, you didn’t actually answer my query – that comment brought me no closer to understanding anything. Also, I’m going to be a dick and ask you to show me the quote where they said “We knew what we were getting into,” else you’re just making the assumption that everyone is as smart and attentive as you are. Also.
And here’s a fun pet peeve of mine; when people start their sentences with “I’m sorry but”. I don’t know why people feel the need to apologise for the opinion they’re about to give.
@UglyDuck: What query are you looking to have answered? What are you trying to understand? As far as I can gather, you don’t think what they did is a bad enough thing to justify a moral stance against their product — and that’s fine. I, however, disagree. I try not to support companies who exhibit poor business practices, and lying to your customers is a poor business practice in my book.
Rickrolling is not an appropriate allusion to this scenario. If GoG had embedded a video of Mr. Astley on their front page, it’d be far more acceptable than lying about your company being shut down. What GoG did is more akin to a ten-year-old child telling his mother that his little sister just got hit by a car, because he wants Mommy’s attention.
@UglyDuck: I’m sorry, but I’m not quite sure what you were trying to achieve with that comment.
@Justin Massongill: Nevermind. I guess I just don’t get this one.
Hah.
This is like that time that one company said that thing and then it turned out they were lying…guys, what does it say at the bottom of this page? “corporate bullshit still exists”…but there’s also a link to buy a classic PC game on GOG! You see? No one got hurt, GOG gets a facelift, and I hear about a website which is quite good and, who knows, I may buy a game off their service.
@Adushan Govender: Dude, you said it yourself: at the bottom of our page it says “corporate bullshit still exists.” First, thanks for noticing! Second, don’t you think that means that if you come to this site, you can expect some time to be spent talking about said corporate bullshit? :)