Who Cares?

Nasty e-mails aside, is there anything technically wrong with practice of blackballing? “No,” says Crecente. “There's nothing wrong with that. They don't have an obligation to talk to us, just like we don't have an obligation to write about them. I posted it because I thought it provided an interesting glimpse into the way things are done in the industry. Not the blackballing part, but the fact that they were so surprised that I wouldn't just not run the story because they asked me. I'm not saying they did anything wrong.... They're supposed to ask me not the run the stories that they don't want me to run, and I'm supposed to post the stories that I think should be running.”

Of course, this isn't a matter of life or death. We're talking about entertainment here, not the war in Iraq. Games press readers are mostly out to waste a little time boning up on the future of time wasting. Should they even care about the influence game companies have over what they read? “I think readers should care,” says Crecente. “Let's say I hadn't run the story. What do you think the reaction would have been had I posted something that said, 'We have this story that we were going to run, but we decided not to because Sony asked us not to?' The only difference is, when someone enters into an agreement like that, they don't post about it.” Kotaku's readers did care, and when the story caught fire on gaming blogs across the net, Karraker and Sony soon re-established professional contact with the site. “In theory, everything sort of returned to normal,” says Crecente.

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.”

Illustration by Joshua Ellingson

For Companies: Not a Game

While such a public gaffe can tarnish the image of a company in the eyes of the relatively small crowd of enthusiasts who follow the business closely, game companies are out for a larger audience. In today's hyper-competitive environment, with millions invested and millions up for grabs, the games industry is serious business.

“PR can be controlling, depending on the publisher and how they deal with their PR plans,” says Flagship's Tricia Gray. “This is because triple-A, next-gen games cost millions and millions of dollars to make. And at the end of two-to-five years, you roll two dice and hope a seven comes up. Otherwise you just dropped $25 million and ruined the lives of 30 or more people.... So don't blame them for being tightfisted. They're just trying to protect their investment the safest way they know how, even if that makes them seem like zealots.”

Cutting Out the Middle Man

While blackballing is usually a temporary punishment doled out to publications who find themselves on the wrong side of the marketing plan, a growing number of publisher-owned media outlets look to cut journalists completely out of the information food chain.

First came Larry Hryb, a Microsoft executive who blogs under the pseudonym Major Nelson. Hryb runs his own site, writes his own news stories, and records podcasts about all things Xbox from behind the corporate curtain. More recently, Luke Smith, News Editor for 1up.com, took a job with Halo developer Bungie, where he now conducts interviews and podcasts for direct distribution to the game's fans.

"I think there is a very interesting potential shift about how people are going to cover and get information about games,” said Smith in an interview with Kotaku. “Right now you have four bridges between developer and reader: Developer to PR, to journalist to reader. This could get rid of those middle two bridges.” Soon enough, as the Internet breaks the readerships of older, larger publications into smaller and smaller online communities, we might see publishers completely bypass independent editors and writers.

Without that filter, it will be up to readers to sort the newsworthy from the unremarkable, the back-of-the-box hyperbole from the honest assessment. But as long as the audience for gaming news continues to value quick, raw information over thoughtful analysis, the power may remain in the hands of those who own the information: The marketers and publicists.