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-hitting outlets because it's been covered.<p>Definitely won't work for all crises, but was eye-opening to me, and a good lesson to those of us with businesses.<p>Bonus tip: the best / worst time to make a social media complaint is on a Friday night - most businesses don't pay someone to monitor social media on the weekend, and conversely most people interact when they're not at work, so complaints are more likely to go viral without a response for many days.
I can't speak to the media/publishing side of things, but personally I stopped talking about SimCity because I stopped playing it.<p>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 politics around "always-on".<p>It is, IMO, by far the least fun Maxis "Sim" game I've ever played, and that holds even if you include Spore.
That's not "silence", that's the power of the "2 week give-a-damn limit". In today's society we're overwhelmed with constantly breaking news from all over the world. People tend to forget about things after about 2 weeks. There's just so many new things to care about that it's impossible to not move on from old news. Especially when it's just about a game. I'm sure gamers will keep the Sim City fiasco in the back of their minds and pirate later games published by EA but for now, we're really just tired of hearing about old news.<p>Same thing happened with the whole "WarZ" fiasco. That team had false advertising on Steam, a glitched game released, artwork from the walking dead was stolen, bug reporters banned from the forums and censored. It was a lot worse than SimCity, yet 2 weeks later we just stopped caring. It's a shitty game, moving on, lets focus on something more important, like plastic in our oceans.
I blame the over-reliance of the journalism profession on PR to get stories. Few bother to do their research nowadays and access to celebrities, company spokespeople and officials are prised more than actually useful information. You can see it in also in politics, science reporting.<p>RPS actually looks pretty good with this - maybe the web can provide a solution to this question? PR and paid publications are ultimately boring, even with the best efforts put in by professionals. If opinion and reporting find a better way of getting monetised on the Internet we may see solution for the boring, corrupt and uninformative media we have today.
While the story went away, did the problem for the company? I personally didn't buy SimCity and I know several people that didn't because of what was up in arms at the time.<p>To me the damage is done. I won't bother complaining or yelling. I just won't pay $80 and if certain organisations keep associating themselves with poor releases/games why would anyone keep handing over their money.<p>Especially when you're releasing something like the next SimCity sequel which plays on older gamers' nostalgia, why would people pay for SimCity 2 in a years time if they remember how poorly this one was sent out into the wild?
This reminds me of the Instagram TOS fiasco. Instagram essentially was burned very badly by doing the right thing, i.e. by being extraordinarily forthright about changing their terms. Usually TOS provide the company the ability to change their terms without any notice whatsoever; we are somewhat unreasonably expected to regularly check back ourselves and try to find changes. Instagram tried to do right by their users by clearly communicating upcoming and significant changes that would affect their users, and the Internet collectively and unilaterally sh*t the bed. I remember thinking they were crazy for doing that, because it was obvious exactly how it would play out.<p>Sometimes doing the right thing is the wrong thing. Unfortunately sometimes silence is golden.
I'm quite glad the story went away. Some company released a crappy product and people got angry. Why? Just don't buy it.<p>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.
I think the simpler alternative is that it's just not a very interesting story. A game company trying to cover their asses for a bad launch of an unpopular design lied their asses off. So what? They seem to have got the server issues under control now, and people are enjoying the game, so it's no longer got the power of public anger behind it.
I think the power of silence depends on the severity of the crisis. If your product is physically harming people or cost someone a lot of money, the controversy probably isn't going away after a few weeks of silence. People will not forget about a loved one being seriously physically or financially harmed.<p>However, if the issue is a buggy piece of software that costs $60, that is going to be quickly forgotten. People don't have the energy to stay upset about something that in the grand scheme of things is so minor. If this is still registering on your personal radar a month later as a serious problem, consider yourself lucky.
If neither silence nor the truth are options, the third best approach is to wait until there is a larger story in the industry that you can hide behind. Perhaps that was what EA was attempting, but unfortunately no larger scandals have occurred.<p>Being able to ride (and manipulate) news cycles is an incredibly powerful skill.
I don't think it really went away, at least for the fans at <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/simcity" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/simcity</a>. It's like a constant steady flow of hate on there, such that I actually feel bad for Maxis after reading a few posts.
This is also true for getting attacked personally on the Internet. If you're getting hit hard by say, 4chan, because they think you did something terrible or whatever, completely ignoring the personal attacks goes a long way towards stopping them.
There is an easier answer in all of this. RPS is out of news and trying to bring back to life a story that got them a lot of clicks. Other than when they are attacking someone, I don't see a lot of RPS links making the rounds.
When I looked at the big hubbub about Yahoo's decision to end telecommuting, I couldn't help but think that Mayer was making the right decision by not commenting. She was hired to turn around a company in crisis, there were major problems, and she based her decision on data (seeing that many people who were supposed to work via VPN weren't even logging in according to their VPN records).<p>It was clearly a unique decision for a unique situation and not a comment on telecommuting in general, despite what all the screamers were screaming. Judging from various comments from alleged insiders, it was a good decision because many of the telecommuters were just loafers.<p>Fact is, who cares what the screamers were screaming? Would people boycott Yahoo's products because they ended telecommuting? This so cannot be compared to buying products made in sweatshops, which many people clearly did for years anyway (and still do). Would employees stop wanting to work at Yahoo? Apparently, job applications are way up, including what industry considers top tier candidates.<p>When you make the right decision, sometimes the best option is to stay quiet and let the truth come out naturally. Of course, OP is more about the strategy in general, not whether or not the truth comes out naturally (in fact, in OP, they cared not for truth). I'm just saying I felt throughout the whole Yahoo telecommuting thing, Mayer did the right thing. Screw the screamers. They had no idea what they were talking about and wouldn't affect Yahoo in any way anyway.
Unfortunately, EA holds a position where they can ignore the complaints of fans. Fans of Sim City, Diablo, etc are the minority of their customers and they can treat us however they want to.<p>Let's face it, Madden '13 and NCAA '13 will sell way more copies than Sim City has. Why should EA give a crap about a few stories on the internet?
I would be interested to know about "why" this whole debacle happened, but much later after I actually get to play the game. I love SimCity, loved almost every single version that Maxis has released, but this latest offering got me scared. So from others out there who play the game...is it even usable at this point?
Mostly I just stopped caring because I already knew EA was horrible, Origin sucks and people only use it when forced by EA, and SimCity is a crappy game (even independent of the DRM issues).<p>Bioshock: Infinite came out and was good. Other than that, I just sit and wait for Civ V's next expansion, GTA:V, etc.
When I heard all the negative press around SimCity, I became nostalgic for my childhood, and bought SimCity for iPod. I've really enjoyed playing it twice. Even though the controls are different, I picked up the knack right away.
It went away because people don't talk about new games after they are released for a couple of weeks. They whine and then most of them move on and look at other upcoming games.
It may seem shocking, but this happens throughout industries (and indeed with governments up to a point - the luxury of silence isn't always available).
"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."<p>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.<p>Hanlon's razor is irrelevant here. Regardless of whether Lucy is so stupid/irresponsible that she really didn't know such an essential detail of her studio's feature product or is simply a manipulative sociopath, decency dictates she be replaced.
The me the kicker was in the comments (one of the first few):<p>"JarinArenos says:<p>I browse plenty of gaming sites… but stories like this are why RPS is the only one that gets AdBlocker disabled"<p>LOL, this is the audience we're talking about here - people who proudly proclaim to the world how they support their causes by <i>gasp</i> disabling AdBlocker! I can see this guy sitting there, basking in his own self-righteousness, how he's such a good guy for allowing some ads (all of which he ignores) to be shown. And then people wonder why companies need to turn to always-online DRM for their software? Ever wondered why the world is turning SaaS-only, with all it's negatives? See it epitomized here.<p>PS thinking of it (and OT), isn't there an AdBlocker version that overlays ads with a white float, rather than not downloading them at all?