The Dark Side of PR, Part 2

My last post about some of the unsavory tricks pulled by video game PR reps prompted this response from an anonymous reader. Read on if you want to learn how bad things can really get in the gaming industry:

So, with all the talk about MTV Gaming’s look at game reviews, here’s an interesting story that shows just how much game reviewers are sometimes powerless to “fight the power.”

A couple years ago, while working at a major gaming magazine, me and the editorial staff somehow managed to get our hands on the entire future release list from a major gaming publisher. Naturally, we were excited. Breaking news is what makes this industry tick, so we were literally sitting on a goldmine of information (i.e. games that hadn’t even been announced yet). We did our homework and made sure it was credible. It was – in fact it came directly from the game publisher. So, like any journalist would, we posted it as a news story.

Minutes later, all hell broke loose. The game publisher started calling us in a frenzy, calling every single person on the editorial team to try and get us to take the story down. In our minds, we had done nothing wrong – we had simply done our jobs. The calls to editorial eventually made their way to the CEO of our company and the game publisher gave him an ultimatum – pull the story or they’d pull millions in advertising dollars. Hamstrung by the game publisher as well as our own CEO, we were forced to pull the story. Then, adding salt to our wounds, we were also forced to post a story stating that our list was a fake.

In the end, the gaming company still pulled their millions of advertising dollars and months later, went on to release every single game on that list. My faith in gaming journalism and the folks who supposedly run it took a serious blow that day. In my opinion, we were not journalists at all anymore, simply people who were told what to do, what to write, and when to shut up. If gaming journalism is ever going to be taken more seriously, its incidents like this that need to be addressed immediately. Obviously I no longer work at that company.