Short Form:

So I Got This Email From PR

Every day (usually clustered around 3pm) Nukezilla is sent emails for games we couldn’t give a damn about. These press releases are often filled with boring crap I don’t want to read, and link to images and videos I never want to see. Sometimes, they’re useful.

In this case, I shall use a single press release we got sent yesterday from a company (who I won’t name, but will say that they regularly email us asking if we want a copy of a game for review, then ignore our replies, wasting our time) as examples of most of the things I hate most about gaming, and PR.

Incompetence

In this press release there are paragraphs for the five global areas with pre-order bonuses. Each paragraph is simply copy and pasted with the distributor changed. It’s so lazy. But, that’s not the incompetence. The email was sent, followed by three more emails to make a correction. Where the name of a UK distributor should be, in the press release was simply “xxx”. Why proof read something when it takes other peoples’ time to read?

DLC announcements months before the game ships

The game this press release is for ships in March. In this email, sent in January, the DLC packs are detailed. I know it’s been a few years since the practice of holding back content to try to sell to you for extra money became mainstream, but it still irks me. These companies kinda hate you.

Shit pre-order bonuses with misleading names

The content of the pre-order bonus is copy and pasted several times for each region and is generic extra weapons and character skins. But for one region the pre-order bonus is named as the “Limited Edition” version of the game. It’s not a limited edition, and as far as I can tell from the information given, is the same exact pre-order bonus as everywhere else.

Nationalism

This one is probably more to do with my personal politics than anything else. The pre-order stuff for every country is fairly generic, except for the USA. In the USA, if you pre-order the game you get a special “God Bless America” DLC pack too. The DLC pack includes such great things as…. an American themed shirt for one of the characters to wear. Americans, I think this game is taking the piss out of you.

Sexism

Here’s the best one. As well as titling the press release in a way which puts “hostesses” on par with the walking dead and guns, the press release boasts that the USA-only DLC is “guaranteed to make you feel manlier”. The other pre-order bonuses are also pushed in a similar way with the fantastically misoganistic tag line “If you like guns, girls, or the two combined – this pack is for you!” This DLC is not for non-straight men. Got it.