Borderlands and Duke Nukem Forever developer Gearbox Software hasn't exactly been at the center of good PR moves lately.
First we had the story in June of how the PR firm hired by Take Two Interactive to promote Duke Nukem Forever posted a tweet complaining about excessively negative reviews for the game and making a veiled threat regarding access to review copies in the future.
Now Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford called stories that announced a sequel to their popular Borderlands game "shoddy journalism." The only reason for making this characterization seems to be that gaming blog Eurogamer published a story claiming a source had told them a Borderlands 2 announcement was imminent.
Now it's not exactly a state secret that a sequel to Borderlands was likely. The game has been wildly successful and its four expansions have given Gearbox a license to print money, so the only thing that would impede Gearbox developing a sequel would be the 2012 Apocalypse (if you go in for that sort of thing.) So saying that an announcement was imminent wasn't exactly earth-shattering.
It's more likely the timing of the Eurogamer story negatively impacted Gearbox's own timeline. Today they made the official announcement about Borderlands 2. If they had planned 8/3/11 as the announcement date, then it must have irritated Pitchford that his buzz may have been muted a little bit - every "leak" story can diminish excitement around the official release. On the other hand, if 8/3/11 had not been the planned announcement date, and Pitchford felt the Eurogamer story was significant enough to take action on, then whatever marketing plan Pitchford had was thrown off.
Ars Technica's Ben Kuchera is of the opinion that Pitchford's irritation lies with the fact that the leak came ahead of an exclusive announcement and news deal granted to Game Informer magazine.
Pitchford clarified via Twitter his take on the whole issue (picture at end of the article):
"Hey, Ben Kuchera - you missed my point and twisted my meaning. Breaking a story is fine! But do it legitimately!"
"But, well... News of the Word - that's where uncouth journalistic practices lead us. You are better than that!"
"Nice picture, though! Love it! Keep up the good fight and stay classy :)"
"The point: Where's the line? If it's broken NDA's or cell phone hacking, the intent and cost to integrity is real."
"Fortunately, most video game journalists are awesome, real gamers and genuinely good people with a strong moral compass."
"And to be clean, Ben, I respect that you found a unique angle and made a story out of it. Good work!"
I think that in this situation both Kuchera and Pitchford have valid points.
There is a reason why NDA's exist, and if a publisher wants to wait until a special time to make an announcement, that should be their right. After all, they're just developing games, it isn't a matter of life or death. And if a publisher grants a media outlet an exclusive and someone with an NDA leaks a story, the value of that exclusive is reduced and the publisher may have more difficulty getting a media outlet to get them some above-average coverage in the future.
On the other hand, Pitchford's irritation does seem to reinforce the quid pro quo implication that seems to exist in the world of game journalism. Events like the Redner group story and the Jeff Gertsmann firing from GameSpot seem to create the impression that developers and publishers need to be treated with kid gloves in order to maintain access to review copies of games prior to release. From the review roundups we do here you can tell that most reviews come out around the same time, and in order to play through a copy long enough to get a good impression a reviewer needs to get their hands on a game as soon as a release copy is available. It is the kind of review challenge that book reviewers face but not reviewers for most other entertainment industries - the amount of time the reviewer has to spend with the product before they can give an honest opinion. Who wants to risk the ire of a publisher and have all the review pageviews (and ad revenue) go to another game site, particularly when there are so many reviewers out there?
Pitchford didn't do anything even remotely "evil" with his comments - but they did raise the spectre of a larger issue that exists in the industry. Hopefully bloggers and publishers can come together in a way that can help reduce the fear of a quid pro quo in the future.
