Lewis, some fair comments but if every PR person was to phone you up about all press releases surely you would get fed up with it?

Unfortunately you know how it is, it's just not possible to personalise every single email......

Sure. And yeah, the phone thing was a bit flippant.

We're talking ideal world here. Maybe it'd be good to have a bit of discourse from your end: how you do stuff and why?

We're generally programmed to be a bit hostile towards PR, which is a little unfair. I think it'd be great if everyone - dev/pub/PR/press - were more open with each other about how they work and why they work like that. Ultimately, we all have the same goal: to get games-related stuff out to the audience. If we could work more closely together on that, we'd be succeeding.

That's very true, to be fair I am very new to this industry and the whole PR world. There are lots of things which I would prefer to do differently but unfortunately like many things it's just not possible.

I think like all walks of life people don't really appreciate the difficulities each side faces (developers, publishers, PR, journalists). I think like anything it comes down to respect, you need to respect and work with your peers and we would all get the best out of each other. Unfortunately this is a tarnished industry and it's easier to criticise than praise.

We work on a variety of titles obviously some better than others, we have to work in many contraints (some set by the likes of Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony etc.) others set by the developers and some set by the publishers. What we have to do is pull all that together and make sure we can keep people informed about future titles. Just because a press release about X isn't interesting to one person, someone else may just be waiting for it to drop into their inbox. The difficulity is trying to target accordingly when we are primed with getting that information out to as many people as possible.

As I am knew to this industry I do try and speak to as many people as possible and it always helps to build relationships and to also find out how I can work to make life easier for them, and to also ensure they keep me updated with any coverage etc.

Sometimes we have to ask uncomfortable questions but they aren't meant as a criticism, it's a case of we have to ask the questions we know our clients will ask us if a review is very harsh etc. We would never try to sway a reviewers opinion on something (something my company have never done and I wouldn't be keen to work for someone who has!). All we ask is for a fair, justifiable review.

Being realistic what could we do to make things better? If we can learn and make the process smoother we will all benefit from it so we are not afraid to change if it's beneficial. Like all PR companies we have a database which we release Press Releases to and also use Games Press etc. I know a good proportion of them are not read for every title, but it's not unusual to get requests for review code and assets relating to a particular title. And also like you said you don't read most Press Releases so if you are sent five about the same product the chances of you reading one of them increases.

So true!

May I (hopefully) speak for all of us here when I say this hideous blog does not speak for us.

http://stopitvideogamepr.tumblr.com/

Further thoughts on it: http://lewisdenby.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/anonymous-blogs-games-pr/

I agree, what a ridiculous website.

Working not just in the gaming industry, you don't realise how nice it is to have the number of press releases we have. Although we do get a press release about "CEO Ties Shoelaces", at least we get that. In many industries they don't even update you on their latest release schedule or anything.