NBA Baller Beats and the twitter Followers that Weren’t

Oh, videogame publishers. When will they stop assuming no one will call them on their bullshit.

In a recent press release for their upcoming Kinect title NBA Baller Beats (which Nukezilla didn’t recieve), Majesco claims that the game has “4 million video views and nearly 700,000 Twitter followers.” As of this post it has 683,460 twitter followers, but the slight round up isn’t what drives this story.

Ben Kuchera of The PA Report decided to look into that number and noticed that the Assassin’s Creed series only has about 130,000 followers, and even the mighty Call of Duty is sitting at 546,000.

After running the Baller Beats account through a couple of twitter lie detecter-like site/programs thingies (he breaks down his whole methodology of testing the numbers in the article), he determined that the vast majority of the game’s followers were either fake or inactive accounts.

Also, it looks like starting about three weeks ago the account started gaining just over 21,000 followers a day, every day. Kind of odd for a game I had only heard off in a couple press released I skipped over and the news of the developer’s studio being shut down a couple months back.

Buying twitter followers is not unheard of, and while no proof of that has yet emerged in this case, there is certainly a “where there is smoke, there is fire” kind of feeling to this story.

Majesco responded to the PA Report piece, issuing the following statement:

“We are pleased at the reception NBA Baller Beats has gotten via YouTube and Twitter, especially given the support of high profile media outlets and athletes.  As with any Twitter account, bots do invade,” Christina Glorioso, CMO, Majesco Entertainment, stated. “We did not buy or instigate any followers, but since its been brought to our attention we are actively working with Twitter to remove and block any automated accounts.”

I still don’t buy it.

It’s a bit of a shame too, because NBA Baller Beats actually looks like an interesting game. I’m not convinced it will actually work given the Kinect’s track record, but it’s an interesting idea for a game.

The only thing this game will be known for to most people is the sketchy PR moves surrounding it.

Via The PA Report