Editor’s Choice: Don’t Blame The PR, Blame The Game

This week Duke Nukem Forever was ritually slaughtered. If you’ve not seen any of the negative press I would recommend reading Ars Technica‘s review of the game, as well as watching the Giant Bomb Quick Look.

Things took a more interesting turn when the official twitter account for 2K Games’ PR company, The Redner Group, sent out a public threat: “too many went too far with their reviews…we r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom”.

Whoops.

This caused a ripple of excitement and news stories making a lot of noise, eventually leading to 2K dropping the company as their official PR team. Which is odd to me, because all they did wrong was to be too honest.

Every PR company which gifts publications with games will read the reviews and determine if it resulted in a net profit or loss. The PR company’s job is to make people want to buy the game, to make money for the publisher and developer. In most cases it’s profitable to send out a free game to a publication or writer even if a negative review is generated; in the long game it’s better to keep sending free games so the writers like you.

I assume the writer can pretend the reason they got the game for free is because of some good-old integrity, honesty on the part of the company, and a general positive movement to help the consumer (I also assume sometimes this is actually the case). Oddly, it seems that it’s only when a writer doesn’t get a freebie that accusations of foul-play come to the floor.

The relationship between reader, writer, PR-person and developer/publisher is rotten. But we only admit to it when something unavoidably public crops up. When this happens everyone mutters that this happens all the time, is just how it works, but that this is terrible. We, as readers, enjoy the drama of this one small incident, then go back to assuming everything is the truth.

It’s like finding a lie in a newspaper. We’re outraged when we read something that we know is false. But then, when we’re reading other articles, we forget that previous false account and carry on sort-of believing. It’s weird.

Partly I believe this is down to the fact we’re taught, and evidence shows, that most people aren’t dicks. Every PR person and writer I’ve met has been friendly, and has just been doing their job. There’s no evil mastermind and/or overlord. Individually everyone is nice, it’s the system as a whole which is just broken (from a certain perspective). Cogs in a machine etc.

This problem extends far outside of gaming, though I probably don’t need to point that out. This recent article on TechCrunch covers the wider tech industry and their PR, which is just in another league to that which we get with gaming. Beyond that, when you start to hit the realm of politics, things ramp up even more.

A solution? Make it profitable to to be good, basically.

This isn’t how PR has always worked, and it’s not set in stone (however much people will wrongly insist that “this is how the world works” or “this is just the way it is, you can’t change it”). We need writers to first of all be very open about their relationships with PR people. For publications, even if it’s just a very passive disclosure at the end of reviews or previews, make it part of the story. If a company knows that flying people to a holiday resort, giving them drinks, two hours to play a ten hour game and have the developer sat next to them would be disclosed, they may think twice. Or at the very least some readers will then take the words with a pinch of salt.

As readers and consumers; find people with good moral compass’ and follow them, read everything you find before a game is released with a cynical eye, always check what details are being hidden (where was the game played, who was there, what other nice things was the writer given, etc.). Also, don’t worry about the “mainstream”. Sure, the PR has them by the balls, but we’re the early adopters. What we do now, the mainstream will do in a decade. Worry about us.

Just be aware that in this industry, most people just want you to look at their adverts or buy their product.

[Disclosure: Nukezilla has been shafted by several PR companies and is still bitter and jaded about the whole thing. Other PR companies and developers are nice to us and make us feel good; we probably subconsciously give their games higher scores.]