MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
In the Feb/Mar issue of MCV/DEVELOP we featured our annual PR Panel, bringing together the good, the bad (in a good way) and the beautiful people of games PR to give us their take on what’s been going on in our beloved industry over recent months.
The magazine feature was essentially a “best of”, so to complete the collection here are all the interviews complete and uninterrupted. We begin with Suzanne Panter of Lick PR.
MCV: What’s been your personal PR highlight of the past 12 months?
Suzanne Panter: I would have to say that the Dead Island 2 campaign is my highlight. Taking a product that has been in development for a while, that had been completely revamped was a challenge, but one that I relished. Working with a talented team at the studio and at the publisher was so thrilling, and to have a sales success too, there is no better feeling.
What’s been the biggest comms faux pas and what should’ve been done to avoid it?
Well. See my answer below – I was made redundant and spent some of 2023 sleeping or holidaying so relishing faux pas was not high on my agenda. I have learned over the years that change is hard and that you cannot please everyone. It is however vitally important to ensure that your messaging is empathetic, accurate and where required has the input of everyone that needs to input. If you make a mistake, own it, apologise and learn.
Redundancies have barely left the news for 18 months. Aside from the loss of talented colleagues, what has been the implication for PR and comms?
This is a subject close to my heart as I was made redundant from Deep Silver after having worked there for ten years. From a personal perspective, it was a shocking and exceptionally sad experience that I needed time to recover from.
To the outside world this level of redundancy and restructure looks quite dramatic. I get asked by friends and family outside of games why so many people are being laid off and if the industry is in trouble?
The impact for comms? I would imagine more reactive statements are doing the rounds in a lot of companies! Other than that, the PR teams at publishers still have products to promote, perhaps budgets have reduced, but hopefully all of my PR colleagues have battened down and have not seen a significant change.
The games industry has always been cyclical and I am completely confident that things will improve. As I was told in my first ever games industry job (which I was also made redundant from) If you want to work somewhere safe, work at Tesco [this is very tongue in cheek!!]
We saw some great games released last year, but the sales numbers didn’t appear to line up with the acclaim. Have there been too many good games? What’s going on?
Can there ever be too many good games? I think the answer here is pretty obvious – there’s a cost-of-living crisis and games are an expensive luxury.
Gamers are savvier now and know that a game will be reduced in price relatively quickly, or it may appear on one of the cloud streaming services meaning they can access the games they want for a significantly smaller price.
Are the days of Twitter/X (aka Twix?) and mass-email-pitching numbered. What will replace them? AI?
Personally, I have never mass pitched via twitter and never would, and apart from the days before GDPR when press releases were mailed from my email address, I’ve never mass pitched. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I cannot imagine a campaign where features are not crafted to suit the outlet it is being pitched to. That can only be done with an understanding of each outlet, a human relationship and discussion.
It’s been suggested that ‘information overload and standing out’ are the biggest PR issues right now. Would you agree and how are you attempting to overcome such challenges?
Standing out has always been one of the main challenges in videogames PR, but now it’s not just a challenge for products, it’s also for the smaller reporting outlets. PRs need to be creative and focused with their outreach to ensure that their message is reported on accurately and in a timely manner.
I believe that information fed to consumers should be layered so that they can find out the amount that they want to know and it is not just through PR – so for example, a story is tweeted (or is it X’d now?) with a short amount of information. A press release is disseminated with slightly more information. A story is pitched with even more information. The product website is updated with all the detail that can be revealed.
