This week saw the release of the first teaser trailer for Hitman: Absolution, the first proper confirmation of the highly-anticipated game’s release and confirmation that it’ll be showing up at E3 2011 behind closed doors. This should’ve been a time for punching the air – a great story to close out a day released at 5pm for the Brits, while the American reporters could start their news day with a bang. A positive event – except it wasn’t.
Instead, Press were irritated and annoyed by the announcement. Why? Well, I’ll let Nathan Irvine, Associate Editor of GamesRadar.com; explain by quoting his tweet around the time of the announcement.
“AWESOME GAME ANNOUNCEMENT TRAILERS SHOULD NOT BE FUCKING DELIVERED AT 4:54PM IF THEY CAN GO UP AT 5PM.” he angrily tweeted – quite right, too. He wasn’t alone. VG247′s Johnny Cullen soon retweeted and explained a little more calmly what had gone down. “To add more context to my earlier tweets, the email carrying the embed code arrived at 16:53,” he wrote. That only gave the site seven minutes to prep the story.
That’s seven minutes to write some coherent copy, double-check it and publish it – and god help you if you’re on a system like the one I’m on where you’re encouraged to actually upload the video to your own servers rather than embed it – I’d wager it’s actually impossible to encode, upload and format the video in addition to writing the story in fifteen minutes, leave alone seven.
The secretive nature of Square Enix as a company and the fact they’re Japanese factors into this stuff in a big way, but there are also plenty of Western-based publishers guilty of the same activity for major stories. Sometimes things have to be kept secret until the last minute, until the bomb is dropped – I understand that – but in the case of a teaser trailer for a game we all knew existed, the secrecy seems over the top and unnecessary. It happens all the time.
A lot of people such as the GJAIF guy shout and stamp their feet about how games bloggers rush. Many don’t proof read or spell-check or have two sources for every claim they make as journalism degree students are taught, but part of the reason that this is so common amongst games writers is thanks to things like this.
What’s here, then, is a publisher seemingly actively encouraging that race to the publish button, as whoever gets there first on that trailer is going to soak up thousands of valuable page impressions. There was no time for anyone to do any of that stuff in this case – no time at all. It sounds silly to blame the publishers, but one thing that is definitely true is that the more this stuff happens the more it’s driven into the heads of games journalists both green and seasoned that it’s okay – or even necessary – to race through a story in order to be first off the blocks.
I’m guilty myself. I remember publishing my Fable II Review exactly two-and-a-half minutes before embargo time to be the first on N4G. I also remember feeling like a rogue or a knave for it. For the sake of 150 seconds it seems ridiculous. I couldn’t give a shit now, but back then that was important to me, and so were the page impressions to my then-small site. I’ve grown as a person and a writer, but that itch still appears every now and then but now I’m wiser it manifests itself in a more mature way – usually leading to great stories written quickly and concisely. That’s nice.
As well as encouraging bad practice, the delivery of the trailer so close to the embargo demonstrates a crippling, saddening lack of trust from publishers in journalists. There’s no surprise, when VG247′s Pat Garratt is tweeting in dismay at other sites ‘bargo busting’ on a semi-regular basis, but the lack of trust is still sad.
We’re not innocent, of course. Half the time the leaks are coming from journalists who love games and love their jobs. They’re excited, and they want to show their fellow fans. PR is all about control, and this takes control from the hands of the PR team – and that’s the opposite of what they want – so they treat many of the journalists like children to protect their product. It’s an unfortunate situation for all parties involved – and what’s needed is a middle ground where the journos get a decent lead-in time but the PR folks keep complete control over the product being promoted.
It should be simple, really. Build up a good relationship; get added to the list that becomes privy to information a decent chunk ahead of time. If you fuck up, you get struck off the list and end up having to scramble to get things up quick – even if your site is massive. Simple. Efficient.
You might argue that under this system it means that the big sites soak up all the impressions from those stories – that the rich get richer – but in my eyes this isn’t actually a bad thing. It means new sites and upstarts will have to work for their growth, earning it off quality writing and features rather than from repeatedly being the fastest fingers with the least interest in proofreading.
That’d be better, surely?
With all that said, it’s not all bad. The very next day Rockstar Games demonstrated how it should be done, and Johnny Cullen was there again, but this time with praise. “Now THAT’s how you release a trailer to press: with an hour’s heads-up. Well done Rockstar.”
You know what? I didn’t get that trailer. Not angry. Not bothered. Clearly, I just need to work harder, chat to the Rockstar PR team more, build up my page impressions some more and earn their trust. That’s hard work – but that’s exactly how it should be.
