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The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away

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Re: The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away

#21

Post by alan_cx »

dagw wrote: post #19
finallyposting wrote: post #4

"That the claims weren't true does not provide room to conclude that [Maxis studio head Lucy] Bradshaw was 'lying' [...] such accusations don't help this discussion." What!? Perhaps part of the reasons evil triumphs in media situations like this is that "good" white knights like the author carry water for people who, like Bradshaw, objectively make the world a worse place. Hanlon's razor is irrelevant here. Regardles…

Bradshaw, objectively make the world a worse place I'm a huge Sim City fan and I'm really upset I'm not getting the Sim City game I wanted, but let's keep some perspective here. Bradshaw and anything that EA/Maxis says or does has absolutely no effect one way or the other on the world.

So, there is no point in them existing then.

Re: The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away

#22

Post by finallyposting »

dagw wrote: post #19
finallyposting wrote: post #4

"That the claims weren't true does not provide room to conclude that [Maxis studio head Lucy] Bradshaw was 'lying' [...] such accusations don't help this discussion." What!? Perhaps part of the reasons evil triumphs in media situations like this is that "good" white knights like the author carry water for people who, like Bradshaw, objectively make the world a worse place. Hanlon's razor is irrelevant here. Regardles…

Bradshaw, objectively make the world a worse place I'm a huge Sim City fan and I'm really upset I'm not getting the Sim City game I wanted, but let's keep some perspective here. Bradshaw and anything that EA/Maxis says or does has absolutely no effect one way or the other on the world.

You're absolutely right. Materially misleading customers about a product is "nothing."

If I post my e-mail address, will you put your money where you mouth is and send me five hundred dollars? Afterall, that's only 0.00001% of SimCity's first week sales. It's nothing.

Re: The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away

#23

Post by smutticus »

I'm quite glad the story went away. Some company released a crappy product and people got angry. Why? Just don't buy it.

It's not as if EA has redeemed themselves in any way. SimCity still has a 1.9 score on Metacritic. The public still agrees this game is a failure and their sales will reflect that.

Re: The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away

#24

Post by bravura »

JacobAldridge wrote: post #3

I facilitated a workshop recently where one of the speakers specialised in, among other things, crisis PR. She said that the two best ways to approach most brand attacks were 1) Silence, and this wasn't appreciated enough by brands wanting to respond; and 2) to 'burn' the story by giving access to mid-level news organisations or softer journalists - once they run with the story, it's often 'burnt' for larger / hard-h…

Is burning a story still effective?

HuffPo will run a story from a mid-tier news org (AFAIK), and then it will go viral.

So it seems this might be a deprecated crisis PR strategy.

Re: The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away

#26

Post by NamTaf »

smutticus wrote: post #23

I'm quite glad the story went away. Some company released a crappy product and people got angry. Why? Just don't buy it. It's not as if EA has redeemed themselves in any way. SimCity still has a 1.9 score on Metacritic. The public still agrees this game is a failure and their sales will reflect that.

A number of reasons:

1) People pre-ordered, but didn't find out about the crippling problems until after installing it. By that time, they'd opened it. People are used to servers being overwhelmed for a few hours right on launch day. After that's passed and the problem persists, the whole thing is too late.

2) EA was refusing refunds of digital downloads. [1]

3) Even if you subscribed to their crap and waited for them to fix it, the game still exhibited crippling flaws which they refused or took ages to address, for example with the game's pathfinding system [2].

I am sure there were other issues that people faced but not being someone who actually fell in to the Simcity trap, I didn't follow it any more closely.

In short, the whole 'just don't buy it' attitude does not work as it's a naive view that completely ignores several key parts of the puzzle. Importantly, those key parts of the puzzle all involve the power resting in EA's hands where the consumers have little leverage to affect change. EA already had their money and had disclaimers on not needing to offer refunds, so the approach of shut up and let the problem go away was fine for them.

[1] https://help.ea.com/article/returns-and-cancellations [2] http://games.on.net/2013/03/maxis-to-address-simcity-pathfin...

Re: The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away

#27

Post by dantheman »

georgemcbay wrote: post #17

I can't speak to the media/publishing side of things, but personally I stopped talking about SimCity because I stopped playing it. Looking back at the whole fiasco, I'm positive that the always-online requirement and server overload will forever define the game, but there was a much bigger problem lurking below that issue, which is that the game sucks anyway even if you disregard the early technical issues and the po…

Agreed, I really wanted to play the game when it first came out, but then the botched launch & DRM waned my interested. Then the reviews started coming in about how the game wasn't fun and quite limited that I've written it completely off.

So now I don't care, I'm not going to purchase the game.

Re: The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away

#29

Post by ghshephard »

bravura wrote: post #24
JacobAldridge wrote: post #3

I facilitated a workshop recently where one of the speakers specialised in, among other things, crisis PR. She said that the two best ways to approach most brand attacks were 1) Silence, and this wasn't appreciated enough by brands wanting to respond; and 2) to 'burn' the story by giving access to mid-level news organisations or softer journalists - once they run with the story, it's often 'burnt' for larger / hard-h…

Is burning a story still effective? HuffPo will run a story from a mid-tier news org (AFAIK), and then it will go viral. So it seems this might be a deprecated crisis PR strategy.

HuffPo doesn't rise to the level of "mid-tier" - they are definitely less Relevant (at least in the united States) than the mid-50 media outlets, and don't even compare to something like the Top Tier (NYT, WSJ, Tribute, LA Times).

For example, from HN Search:

Results 1-10 of 493 for http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Results 1-10 of 12,273 for nytimes.com

Re: The Power Of Silence: Why The SimCity Story Went Away

#30

Post by rmc »

JacobAldridge wrote: post #3

I facilitated a workshop recently where one of the speakers specialised in, among other things, crisis PR. She said that the two best ways to approach most brand attacks were 1) Silence, and this wasn't appreciated enough by brands wanting to respond; and 2) to 'burn' the story by giving access to mid-level news organisations or softer journalists - once they run with the story, it's often 'burnt' for larger / hard-h…

Can you expand on the burn thing for those of us who don't know much about pr? Is it just because hard hitting journalists don't like to be second?
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