I’m a terrible traveller. After taking the red-eye back from San Francisco, I slept for the better part of a weekend, and it’s taken me until tonight to have enough energy to actually write something. Thankfully, I don’t do it very often, but that’s the reason I’m about five days late with this particular post.
So, I didn’t get much of a chance to see any actual sessions at GDC, but I was able to get away for one entitled “Next Generation PR for the Game Industry.” It was a bit of a waste of time, since it was basically a PR 101 panel, and nothing particularly interesting came out of it, but what struck me as interesting was the fact that only the Microsoft PR guy had anything positive to say about community and blog marketing. One of the panelists seemed like he was against social media altogether.
This struck me as completely amazing, since the Web is precisely where I would go for real information on games I wanted to buy. I might check out the online versions of the gaming pubs, but for the most part, I would want to know what real people are saying. As a PR person then, I would consider it my job to get the game in front of those who I think would be influential, and whose tastes I already have a sense for from past reviews, and get them to talk about it. I would empower communities around specific games or types of games to spread the word. To me, the industry pubs would be a secondary goal. I know you can’t send preview copies to everyone, but to outright ignore social media seems pretty silly to me.
The interesting thing that I noticed in the question period is that most of the questions were from the press asking “how can we get you to take our publications seriously?”
That’s a different flavour than I think most of us are used to, but it’s the way it goes when you’re dealing with big entertainment properties, be it film or games. The biggest publications get the best deals – media tours, private screenings, access to talent. Still, it always seems odd to hear.
I wish I could say I got a whole lot out of this session, but I really didn’t. I’m sure it was interesting for the game developers there, but for anyone who had been in the industry for any length of time, it was just stating the obvious.
