Easy Ways to Kill 3 Brands

Dear brand managers and PR directors all over the World, has the Internet got news for you: gamers are not dumb, as superficial as they might seem after playing just a bit over 30 hours a week.

In the wake of yesterday’s news about Activision merging with Blizzard, the first reactions were not ‘Oh how splendid, we will see a lot of better quality games because they’ll be competing with EA‘ but ‘Oh b*llocks, more advertising in-game and stupid level designs‘ because when you put together two famous game design methods (e.g. Guitar Hero’s “unlocking” mode and Blizzard’s famous Starcarft, Warcraft, World of Warcraft and the infamous “patch days” that come along with it) you can only think of the worst as far as what you’re interested in goes. And that’s just the game, not how much money they make from these deals.

So a bit of news that may never reach the ears of people concerned with marketing, advertising in PR unless someone picks it up and turns it into a case study and publishes a book. Very unlikely! 10-year old Gamespot editor Jeff Gerstmann was fired and rumour has it his “bad” review of Kane and Lynch was the cause. Saying it’s a rumour because almost five days have passed and there’s no official answer from anyone as to what the hell happened. Jeff gave the game a 6/10 and had a very incisive review on the game’s storyline, learning curve, interaction and artificial intelligence system. If you don’t play a lot of games the video itself might sound really strange but if you take at least my word for it, it just says “well, yeah, it’s a decent game and it has its moments but only in short bursts, on the long run it’ll bore you to death“.

The problem was, no one had told Jeff that Eidos (the game publisher) were paying Gamespot loads of money to advertise on their website. Imagine the shock and horror on their faces while eating pie and a 6/10, almost mediocre review makes its way to the front page. Uh-oh. Someone was bound to get hurt!

Events following this:

• Jeff gets fired
• Eidos closes every forum thread about the news (“Speak no evil”)
• Gamespot is all silent and clueless
• CNet, company that owns Gamespot says “We can’t say why because it we are not allowed to talk about their privacy and we are a bastion of unbiased reviews”
• Furious gamers force Gamespot to close down the voting system for the review as it got flooded with “1/10″
• Same furious gamers tag the article that announced Jeff’s booting with “adolf hitler, “absolute bullshit”, “sell out”, “were-all-leaving”, “lamespot”, “cunts” and all the other words I love to see when companies treat people like they’re stupid and don’t apologise

I can imagine this scenario where these companies repeatedly call Jeff and leave messages on his phone saying “IF YOU SAY ONE WORD, MOTHERFUCKER, WE WILL KILL YOU” so he doesn’t have a word to say in all the story. All this while, us gamers and scandal lovers are still waiting for one of the above to say something, anything, before Gamespot, Eidos and whoever else was involved get dumped to the internet bucket of shit.

Morals of the story:

• It’s nice to apologise or elucidate the matter
• Never assume you will be the hero in your advertiser’s eyes when you fire the guy who made them look bad
• Gamers are not stupid and deleting threads, locking them, removing content will only make it worse
• It’s always nice to have a plan for when shit hits th fan.
• If you don’t apologise, people boycotting your website by deleting their accounts and telling their friends about “what they did” along with no one believing one word of any review-yet-to-come isn’t worth all the Eidos ads in the world.