The fine folks at GamesRadar have put together a Top 7 list of PR disasters. Enthusiasts gaming sites like GamesRadar are generally product and news focused, making relationships with PR professionals essential. Editors have to depend on PR folks for a large chunk of their jobs, while overzealous sales teams often change their editors’ heavy blows into powder puffs. It’s nice to see a site with enough cheek to bite the hand that feeds them.
Some of the targets in the article are obvious and almost too easy to go after (Uwe Boll, John Romero), but it’s interesting to see some recurring themes behind these PR disasters. In some cases, the publisher’s marketers and PR flaks misunderstand what gamers really want; this often stems from said professionals not being gamers and/or not knowing their audience. In other cases, the PR people totally overestimate the value of their property. Shocking PR stunts for a c-level game aren’t likely to result in more sales, just curious stares.
Some curious omissions from the recent past are the Infinium Labs Phantom, the Nokia N-Gage, and the Tiger Telematics Gizmondo. Perhaps GamesRadar felt they weren’t significant enough to mention, but millions of dollars were pumped into the PR efforts of each product and the respective companies having little or nothing to show for it.
Highlights (or lowlights, really) include the final days of Acclaim and Rockstar’s Hot Coffee debacle. Acclaims final few years included the ill-advised melding of an action-sports icon and soft-core porn, as well as PR stunts that were in extremely poor taste (paying people to put the Shadowman logo on their loved one’s tombstones). The Hot Coffee mod for Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas unlocked a disabled, but not deleted, sex scene. The negative PR not only rocked Rockstar, but every major publisher as well. Sony opens and closes the list with the PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3, respectively.
The article lists several examples of how publishers waste millions of dollars on misguided efforts. Instead of wasting too much money on PR stunts, maybe publishers are better off spending it on more mirror servers, so gamers can download their demos easier. While it’s easier said than done, the best thing a publisher can do is have a compelling product that it can build a large community around. Engraving gravestones is no match for fostering a community.
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