PR Crisis Planning in the Gaming Industry

The gaming industry has an incredible fan-base. These fans will travel the world to take part in tournaments or to watch their favourite players.

There are very active communities that discuss pre-launch and post-launch games. Die-hard fans to recreational players, the community and interactivity that the gaming industry sees is incredible.

The issue with these communities, global and growing fans and channels of interaction is that things can get out of shape pretty fast.

The gaming public loves to speculate and they tend to be pretty good at expectation setting. It’s when things go wrong or the opposite of fan expectations that makes this industry show it’s depth with the public.

Mismatched messaging and mistimed releases spread like wildfire, from one community to another. From one poor review to hundred’s one small trigger can feel like a catalyst for impending doom.

But, like any other company you can be forward thinking and start conducting crisis planning. Discussing any crazy idea that could become a reality which will cause potential disaster makes a big difference. When disaster strikes you do not want to be fixing problems as you go along.

3 Gaming PR Disasters in 2018
You have most likely seen one of the PR disasters below last year, either from industry news. Or you could have seen it all unfold on platforms such as Reddit where the gaming community is strong.

EA’s Battlefield 5
A popular multiplayer franchise with an avid following until it left marketing for BF5 a bit lacklustre. The initial trailers were being accused of showing unrealistic battles and females in the field. This caused a stir with many fans and Patrick Soderlund reply caused a stir:

“These are people who are uneducated—they don’t understand that this is a plausible scenario, and listen: this is a game.” he also added to the statement “And we don’t take any flak. We stand up for the cause, because I think those people who don’t understand it, well, you have two choices: either accept it or don’t buy the game. I’m fine with either or. It’s just not ok”.

Diablo Immortal
Diablo for a lot of gamers is a game that they grew up playing. With it’s unusual style and ‘different’ formula the game has kept a solid and committed fan base.

So at Blizzcon, the Diablo fans were expectant of a Diablo 4 at the very least. Things didn’t pan out as expected and the actual presentation was very much against gamers desires – a mobile version.

Diablo fans started to accuse Blizzard of trying to cash in on mobile gaming. With the presenters response being “Do you guys not have phones?” the announcement didn’t go as planned.

The real problem here is that a Diablo follow-up game was announced after. Which could have avoided this drama and not getting referenced to as it is now.

Bethesda’s Fallout 76
A fantastic and much-loved game series as with the examples above, Fallot 76 was meant to be a big release. Yet, Bethesda went across the grain and instead of sticking with the style and format that the fans are used too, they changed things up.

The real problem was that on release the game was considered unplayable. Endless glitches and problems resulted in many complaints. Many people even requested a refund which was acknowledged at first but soon these were denied. For obvious reasons this didn’t go down well with the community.

Planning for Crises in Gaming
It’s pretty evident that with a gaming series you should stick with what works and not try to cash in on the user base. That’s a first but how can you prepare for the many other circumstances or scenarios that could happen?

PR crisis planning for gaming is exactly the same as any other industry. It takes time and working together to brainstorm the most ridiculous ideas to the most common but it allows you to pre-plan how to fix things.

Planning for a PR crisis needs full attention and to get various people from the company involved. I’ll break down into sections the steps to take in crisis planning.

1. Anticipate All Crises
There are no ideas which are too silly or far-fetched. Get as many ideas added with this exercise. Ensuring you cover all basis and as I said, there are no bad or silly ideas. The world works in mysterious ways so anything can happen.

2. Assemble the Team
You need to gather key people from all areas of your business. Sales, marketing, management and so on. These individuals will provide a unique view of your customers, industry and company that you may not see. Having various roles from parts of the company also make #1 much easier.

3. Spokespeople
Who will run the show during a crisis? The default would be the CEO. But, are they the right person for the situation? Again start to build a list of spokespeople that will be the key individual to speak with media etc during a crisis.

4. Monitoring Systems
In PR, especially a crisis, you need to start controlling the conversation as soon as possible. If the community or media take control, then you have a serious issue on your hands. Monitoring systems provide you with an easy way to hear what people are saying and engage with them.

5. Know Your Stakeholders
With the crisis examples above it may feel as if the company forgot about their stakeholders. Which makes this exercise even more valuable. When running through this everyone will get a reminder of who they are appealing to and why – avoiding any potential crisis too.

6. Holding Statements
These are silent press releases or dedicated newsrooms that wait in darkness for crisis to strike. They tend to be a selection of statements to address most of the scenarios that you have played out. With placeholders to swap in/out wording on the go.

Prepping for a crisis needs time, care and attention otherwise there are many risks that come with a runaway disaster. To maximize the crisis plan you can check out this indepth crisis planning guide that I also created with a downloadable spreadsheet.