PR And The Game Media, The Rockstar Way 46
simoniker writes "Discussing PR and the media, former Rockstar Games PR rep Todd Zuniga discusses how the company tried to manipulate the game press as part of an in-depth article on how the two forces interact: "In part, it's a numbers game... Otherwise, it's history. Who wrote negatively about the games, and who hasn't? We never worked with [gaming website] GameSpot while I was there because 'they just didn't get it.'... Hilariously, we even had a list of journalist preferences: 'Likes cake, married, went to school at Indiana U'.""
The trick (Score:4, Insightful)
Naturally, the best review is a play-through yourself, but that's not always viable (or wanted.) A very good way to get unbiased reviews is to look up personal opinions on various websites such as Amazon, Rottentomatoes, etc...
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If you weren't an anonymous coward, we would track you down since you just said you were a paidophile.
Cheers!
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It's funny, because I've had the exact opposite impression of most ranking systems employed today. Everyone tends to either give the game a perfect 10/10, a 1/10 because it's not their cup of tea, or an average score like 8/10. After it's all tallied, it just becomes so much statistical noise.
Ever wonder why the "top" games on any site are always the newest? This is often done to compensate for their ranking system which place
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That's why there are reviews to go with the scores...
I think if you really care about your $50 or $60, it makes sense to read more than just a single score on a single web site - even if it's supposedly an aggregate.
Not that convenient. (Score:3, Interesting)
What would be more efficient (not necessarily more entertaining) is something like "Reviewer A who liked A,B,C very much also liked X", and say one paragraph of comments. And if lots of "reviewers" who have similar tastes to you liked X and their one paragraph is intriguing enough, you are very likely to like X.
I claim that even though there are 6 billion people in the world, the groups of computer game (or movie) preferences are a lot fewer.
Say we have a system where each registe
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We just need someone to re-implement for www.videogamegeek.com
Ridge Racer (Score:2)
I buy a new Ridge Racer (the recent versions I own are the DS version, the first PSP version, and the PS3 version) from time to time, and I wish they'd fix the stupid "I'm on rails and can drift around a corner backwards while doing a 360" crap.
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It takes reviews from loads of sites, offers links to the reviews, and gives you a standard score out of 100 for the game. It also has user comments, which can be useful.
Game magazines? (Score:2)
Cheers!
Nothing to worry about (Score:3, Interesting)
I've worked for two well-known gaming journalism groups, and I can tell you that game developers don't have quite as much control over the content of feature articles as this article might have you suspect.
The principled difference between an advertisement and a feature story is that a company has control over the content of the ad, and that the advertisements are usually handled by the entity producing the game, not the developers.
Developers may control the spigot of game-related information, but they don't control the spigot attached to the gaming press' fingers and mouths. Editor impressions, exclusive previews, and game reviews are all written by the editors of the press outlets, and we get paid by our company, not by the software developers, to write these things. We really do want to help you save money by pointing out which games are worth your time and money.
All of these are elements are effective at providing a check against any potentially slanted information that a company may try to use to artificially spike its product's popularity, and believe me - they get called on this very quickly when it inevitably fails.
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20% of your ad revenue comes from EA. Would you bash EA Cricket 2007? Would I find an honest comparison of Codemasters' Brian Lara Cricket vs. EA Cricket 2007 in your magazine?
Cheers!
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I would regularly see terrible games given ratings of 2%-8% in amiga power, when those same games never got less than 70% in other magazines... The only games with really poor reviews in those games, were small shareware/freeware games where the author didn't have enough reso
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Review inflations does make economic sense ... (Score:2)
That is clever side stepping, such extreme cases are unrealistic. What is realistic is that when something is a wobbler, there be a temptation to give the developer/advertiser the benefit of the doubt, a review score of 9.0 instead of 8.9 for example. Such "inflations" are not detectable by the readership, they are within the normal error of human reviews, so your credibi
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Of course, if you were not being pedantic, and you really wanted info,
Codemasters is supposed to have the better game.
Neither is available for US Consoles. Only PC
http://www.electronicarts.co.uk/productsview.aspx? id=9156 [electronicarts.co.uk]
http://www.codemasters.com/brianlara2007/ [codemasters.com]
Cheers!
--
Vig
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Obviously, not so in the market for one that I've researched their existence, or I wouldn't have had to say anything.
Now that I'm aware such a thing exists, I may pursue acquiring it, though I'm not generally a fan of sports games on the PC.
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Enjoy the game! (tip: buy the Aussie/Indian version - Pommie software is more expensive)
Cheers!
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Vig
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That's exactly what I was thinking...
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Reviews (Score:3, Insightful)
I find I'm occsionally disappointed by spending when I shouldn't have (child of mana) but on the flip side I get gems that fit my gaming needs I might have otherised passed up due to low review scores (Izuna).
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You NEED to get some grasp on whether a game will be good or not. I find NO reviews spoil the games for me. They tell as much of the plot as is in the manual, maybe a little more, but this CLEARLY doesn't ruin the game for me.
What's nice about Xbox Live is you can download the DEMOS of the game, then you can
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EB is like the new Follett... bastards.
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http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=265627&
But I suppose to prevent spoilers, I should have different view modes:
1) All comments off in all reference groups
2) Comments from this reference group on.
3) All comments on.
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I rented F.E.A.R. after hearing all the "you have to play this game" hype. I played it. I was bored half way through. I looked up a walk-through to read the rest of the plot without dragging my fingers through the game. I read the reviews
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What drug was the illustrator on? (Score:1)
And this is news, how? (Score:2)
Every month a game magazine manages to come up with some "hot new title". Yet how many games each year are actually good? Yeah, I thought the same thing.
For a while there I was receiving a copy of Computer Game World for unknown reasons. (I
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12?
:-)
Overly positive reviews. (Score:2)
It's like those supposed long-term reviews of cars. Except that the car is constantly bei
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Back in the day, there was a UK Amiga magazine called Amiga Power! who were vehemently against magazines being bought off for favourable reviews. They made use of the full review scale - 0% to 100% and railed against other magazines never going below 60%.
They came up with a score that would placate game publishers who were pushing for good reviews, which was the lowest that you could get away with giving without incurring their wrath - this score was 73%, and they occasionally used this score in a somewhat
The summary vs. TFA (Score:2)
As part of the effort to personalize, Rockstar's PR department tracked scores for reviewers on a person-by-person basis, often hoping to influence which writers were selected to review their games. "Rockstar was big on trying to get specific people to review specific games," says Zuniga. "But it's a fine line--you can't just come out and ask, because it seems like you're trying to take away editorial control." They went so far as to track seemingly pointless personal details of some writers. "Hilariously, we even had a list of journalist preferences: Likes cake, married, went to school at Indiana U. Shit like that," says Zuniga. "It was a weird f*cking place to work."
In the end, the efforts never earned the kind of scores head honchos wanted. "The score would never live up to the expectation," says Zuniga. "If it scored a 99, the expectation was for every other review to be 100." What the higher-ups wanted was what business tends to want: predictability, something that can be planned and executed. "They wanted to feel comfort," says Zuniga. "They wanted to know that when we went to Company A and talked with Person B that we could expect result C."
As the article goes on to say, PR efforts can be actively counter-productive:
Veteran Laura Heeb Mustard says that, in the end, blackballing isn't an effective strategy for a publicist--that, in fact, it's bad PR. "While there are many ways to attempt to persuade a journalist to hold on a story, one way I would not recommend is by trying to bully them into not reporting the item," says Mustard. "While there are some outlets that may retreat in fear of being cut off, there are others that will retaliate against your threats. Now, they're in a position of scooping your news--with the added bonus of a juicy story about how you tried to strong-arm them. We've seen a number of different cases of this recently, and quite frankly, in each case there are more effective strategies that could have been applied."
Often, she says, such strong-arm tactics are not born in the PR department, but further up the chain of command, where executives have less experience in the trenches with the media and more power to wield. "While it may be the PR person that is ultimately tasked with carrying out the threat, you should dig deeper into where the actual threat is coming from. I bet it's from someplace in management," says Mustard. "Execs have a hard time reading bad press because they very quickly see the negative impact of it. And because they usually have the authority to do so, they often come down on PR to either 'fix the problem' or to punish the outlet. However, because they aren't involved in day-to-day media relations, they often fail to see the long term negative impact of retaliation against the media."
just wait for it (Score:2)
It's the natural consequence of an undeniable fact: The games press is almost entirely dependent on access to information, people, and products that only game publishers can provide. You want the latest details on a game that's still a year away from release?
Actually, not really no. I'm quite a frequenter of IGN during times of peak console output (I consider the current lag between console launches and actual quality software to be a real slow time so I haven't been to IGN in months). I just realized though, I never really read stories on upcoming games. I go straight to the reviews. I could care less about the impressions an IGN reviewer has on a game that's 50% done, especially when something as organic as game development can oscillate wildly towards its e
Some thoughts from a reviewer (Score:1)
I review games for the Adrenaline Vault [avault.com] site, and I must say even I do not know how the whole thing works. I get sent my assignments, I play the game for a while, then write the review and send it to my editor. He hacks out the critical parts, and posts some bland version of my usually critical work. Although I am often given choices as to what games to review I have no idea why the choices that are presented in front of me are there in the first place. I certainly have no contact with any developer or adve