Over the past week, there’s been some controversy going on with Two World II developer TopWare Interactive. The main allegation is that TopWare Interactives PR have been blacklisting sites that gave their product a lower score than 7/10. This of course has been denied by TopWare Interactive. Destructoid has put up a whole new list of other shenanigans and questionable stuff from the PR of this company.
This list includes things like manipulating game stats/ranking on IGN by switching IPs, pressuring outlets that posted unfavourable review scores based on a preview copy while allowing sites that posted positive reviews off of the same preview code up, employees writing Amazon reviews and youtube comments, and even a planned attempt to bribe Destructoid for an 8.5 review of the game. While destructoid maintains that these are just allegations, the post goes in depth with other people from the media that confirm that TopWare Interactive had indeed tried to manipulate the media in some shape or form. You can read Jim Sterling's lengthy take on the subject here.
PR people, treat the media well. Accept criticism and the fact that some people wont like your game. Want to get positive reviews, learn from the criticisms of your game and make a better game. Don’t get hostile with the media, you’ll only receive more brickbats.
Just to add towards the end. Being a PR student and reading about this, by default some PR companies or PR Departments don't practice this sort of thing unless they told to do it intentionally by the company.
ReplyDeleteThen again it could be that the Topwire Interactive was was using a more agressive form of PR with thier team and went abit overboard.
But overall the field of PR, lots of people has seen and even practice such behaviour in the past before with other types of companies (Mostly towards Oil & Gas related ones)
After talking to Frags about this issue, its funny that this had to do with a gaming company and one that is as new.
This could be the 'Growing Pains' or just a bad decision by someone on top.
However, do understand that sometimes the PR guys aren't always the ones who are the only people at Fault.
There could be other factors influencing the 'issue' and probably the guys doing PR are the ones who are facing the firing squad.
(If anyone didn't realize what I just did there, its also called 'Spin Doctoring'. Hence make sure to take all factors into consideration before giving the final verdict...just like in reviewing XD)