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Gamasutra Podcast Transcript - Game Reviews Roundtable
Kasavin: I share some of your frustrations, but I guess I can see it from the perspective that they're just being really protective of their intellectual property essentially. I think the publishers who realize that they have to let go a little are really going to benefit in the next year. YouTube, I think, is the biggest phenomenon that's affected games coverage in a while because publishers used to be - and they still are - very, very protective of the format of their video. There's a publisher that says, "You can only put up our videos in downloadable QuickTime because we want to make sure people see it at the right quality." People just don't care. They want to see it now. Anytime something's at Tokyo Game Show or something, it's going to be on YouTube right away. Publishers who insist on not officially giving out their assets are shooting themselves in the foot, because that stuff's going to get out there anyway. If they're prepared to show something to the small subset of people, then they should be prepared to show it to the world at this point. Kim: I can say that, as a developer, usually we were so busy getting the game done. Unless you had somebody whose job it was to actually take those screenshots, they probably wouldn't get done because everyone was already behind time with the tasks they were assigned. Greg, I totally hear you with your frustration about - the publisher only wants to set up some kind of canned demonstration. When you ask them for material that you want to cover their game in certain ways, but they're still not willing to give it to you - that's got to be maddening. Vederman: The problem there is, as I alluded to earlier - we're selling games with our previews probably more so than with our reviews, all of us. If you're telling me as a developer that you don't have the time to get me your screenshots, then my response to you is, then you're not trying as hard as you can to sell your game. Kim: That's an appropriately perfect response, and I think that's actually the right response. It's a value proposition. I think the problem is, there's this lack of interface between the press, publishers, and developers themselves. If developers would perhaps be more proactive about this - a little bit of investment of time could result in a much better end result for them. Well, what are some things that you guys would like them to do, to make your job easier to sell their products? Davison: Some of the best results that we've seen from articles both in print and online over the last six months have been: when the studio or the team has their own rep who is briefed by the PR militia and who knows what they're allowed to give out and what they're not, but is a direct interface with the studio. The results are faster. We get stuff. The guys tend to know the games more intimately. We worked with guys at Insomniac during Resistance. But they were much faster, and they had much better access to stuff than SCEA. Same dealing with Epic for Gears of War. They were great. I think for this to move in the right direction, the studios need to take back ownership over the communication. Vederman: Do you think that has more to do with possibly the PR people that you're interfacing with? Because I feel, as I'm sure you both do with a number of boutique PR agencies - not across the board obviously, but at a lot of those agencies, they are experts. That interfacing with them - it feels, to me at least, as easy as interfacing with a PR person who works directly for the company. There are exceptions, of course. But I've worked plenty times with internal PR that just didn't know anything either. I think part of the issue might be that, it's just we need more people that are passionate - whether they're agency or internal - that games PR is fundamentally different from other entertainment mediums, and just because you were good at one of the other ones doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be good at games. We need to have more people who understand the products they're working on as a whole. Davison: That would definitely help. I'm learning to appreciate the new Microsoft model, which is a three-pronged attack. You have the guys at Microsoft, the guys at Edelman, but then you've also got the community guys that are popping up that are responsible for just one game. That seems to make a big difference because they're in touch with what people want to hear about pre-release, so they're pre-empting what we're going in and asking about because they are looking at the same places we are and what people are latching on to and we want to see more screenshots of this. So we want to see this guy talking about why he felt that was the necessary choice to make. They can pre-empt that and that can be a really smart way to take things. Vederman: It is and obviously it takes head count. It takes the investment in manpower to make that happen, but I think you're right. You get better coverage out of it and I think anybody who is saying that they don't have time to stop development to get screenshots, to get assets, to get information from the developers to the press probably needs to reconsider how they are organized and maybe flip things around so that earlier in the process resources are made available to us from people that really know the products. That are really in-tune with the message they want to sell. |
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