I get that marketing send swag to partners they feel can boost their product. It’s a thing back to the Fuller Brush era. This just seems kind of gross.
They send some favored streamers a Cyberpunk chair. Because, I guess this game will miss some iota of hype if they didn’t do this?
KevinC
1770
I’m not sure I follow what’s particularly gross about it. The local bank has advertisements near the court during basketball games, I’ve never thought of that as gross and I don’t see this as any different?
Because I guarantee these same streamers will be doing previews, reviews, and exhorting their audience to buy the game.
KevinC
1772
Oh I get you now, thanks.
And I wanna be clear. I’m sure shilling for CDPR is pretty low risk, right? I doubt Cyberpunk is going to be some kind of train wreck product.
I’ve just always felt these kinds of things, including flying reviewers out to racing schools and letting them burn rubber on a test track to “let them compare the experience” with the upcoming racing game, or sending reviewers free gift boxes are all just blech.
I mean, a let’s play that isn’t by Tom Chick and goes more than a few hours is pretty much that, anyway. At least if the person doing the shilling is sitting in a Cyberpunk chair, you know where they’re coming from.
Yeah, I’m not sure this is what I’d call money well spent, but it doesn’t seem vile or anything. They are giving them a product they hope will be on camera for hours a day to lots of people.
I wouldn’t say “vile” either. On the moral scale of issues, I worry about a lot of other things before this. Swag for influencers/reviewers has been a thing forever.
I very much doubt there is any “you will cover our game favourably in exchange for the chair” type of deal there.
But that will be the conclusion anyone watching their steams will land on when they see the chair in the vid.
There never usually is an explicit deal.
In comms/pr across the board this isn’t unusual (except federal government because of gift restrictions). You always want to be building good relations with your contacts, and they want to build it with comms/pr people. It’s not a quid pro quo for either party, typically, it’s about gaining good will, falling somewhere between generousness and transactional. There is a reason a lot of people in comms/pr are friends with journalists and vice versa.
I mean, prior to The Witcher 3 coming out, CDPR flew a bunch of internet streamers (including Gopher, Jesse Cox, Angry Joe among others) to to Poland to hang out at a castle and have a good time and play the game for an extended period of time.
Getting a chair – even a really good one – seems to pale in comparison.
And yeah, pretty much every industry throws swag around, even to those who are paid to be independent reviewers. Not sure why this is any big deal at all.
I think it’s crass and ugly. And not just the chair.
The free chair thing is kind of lame, but I’m more disappointed with CDPR putting streamers in the actual game.
The game press event/swag scene is crass as hell, but it’s been industry standard for a long time. At Yahoo, big boxes of free stuff were standard, as were insanely lavish press events. (Trips to Italy, France, and England were among the fancier ones.)
There’s obviously the potential for unspoken quid pro quos. (At Yahoo we generally salved our consciences by writing previews, not reviews, of the swag-givers’ games. I at least never wrote a review that was swayed by anything but my play experience. Still, it’s an aspect of my old job that I look back on with more guilty pleasure than pride.) The practice should probably be banned. But if this is becoming some kind of a scandal for CDPR, then, y’know, there’s a long line behind them.
Not a fan either, but then I ask myself how this is any different from them casting other celebrities like Keanu Reeves. I guess you could argue it’s a different level of famous but that answer doesn’t fully satisfy me (which is tough since I’m in the “Keanu fine, streamer meh” camp).
I guess in that case the difference would be that Keanu is a professional actor, not somebody who streams games for a living. The tit for tat is different – it’s “here’s a bag of money, act in our game” vs. “here’s an NPC, hope you like the game, nudge nudge wink wink!”
Honestly, in 2020 I’ve got other shit to feel aggrieved about.
Is it that different from Conan O’Brien in Death Stranding, in that they are both ‘professional entertainers’, and not necessarily actors?
I don’t know this guy so wouldn’t have noticed anything. No real issue unless the performance turns out terrible and the game is compromised because of it.
(Though obviously the integrity of said streamer’s views on the game are suspect, but then so are Conan’s in his Clueless Gamer skits)
