GAF is closed community where you need to wait months to get account here and yet in that infamous MS thread bans were given one after another and almost every new page contained banned juniors that started being alive just before or after MS fuckup.
My point is: If closed community have shills on almost every page in that thread then imagine what is happening on open forum when you can create account in 2 minutes.
Shills are not "minor occurrences" Shills are standard of industry and not even for gaming.
Did you hear about iOS reviews/buys shills ? book review shills ? That is part of industry which is constantly growing.
I'm well aware of industries that make use of shills extensively. I don't think you can get any worse than on Bodybuilding.com
Unfortunate outcome? That's kind of the entire point. There isn't a controlled message here so Industry types can be asked the tough questions if they do something shitty.
There's no point in hounding someone about an issue he has no control over. That's my problem with it. I don't ask a McDonald's cashier why Egg McMuffins aren't made from free-range eggs. I'll use the Sim City AMA again as an example. When the devs posted there, the intended result of the backlash was for them to reconsider the DRM. That didn't happen. It wasn't going to happen. Why? Because the way most publishing/community/marketing approach internet media and discussion--they view it as a highly visible, but small, portion of users. The actual result--EA will probably prohibit their studios from ever doing AMAs again. Actual results are obtained through poor sales and poor reviews.
You are either daft or being ridiculous, I want to think you're just being ridiculous, this is a gaming forum, and we talk about games, if you have a strong bias (a paycheck and career thanks to a particular company is a pretty strong bias toward said company) and spread a message favorable to the source of your income on a gaming forum, you are as much a shill as someone who is paid to shill.
lol, you'd be surprised. The vast majority of people I've met in the industry--especially those who
aren't managers or stakeholders in a company or product--are there to do their job. They're enthusiastic because they enjoy the product, not because they're there to push the company line.
It's much easier for me to trust someone giving positive news about a studio WHILE working there than it is for me to believe someone giving negative news about a studio AFTER working there, especially if the split is not amicable. I've seen, firsthand and secondhand, far too many accounts of people outright lying about conditions after being fired. Now obviously there are many (confirmed) accounts to the contrary, but most of the real ones are corroborated by people still working there.
Just because they don't have documentation to prove that said proselytizing was a corporate mandate, doesn't mean it wasn't. It's pretty standard procedure to go about unscrupulous behavior for the benefit of the company with off the books orders from on high.
That way, if word gets out, only those directly responsible for said morally gray actions will be hung out to dry, saving the company further bad press.
I'm sure Microsoft execs WANT you to think it's just 'a few employees who are passionate about their company posting their feelings', because that would leave the entity looking not like a greasy, morally bankrupt monster.
That's a strong accusation at the industry, and I'd love to know where you're getting this assumption from. Given how rough games industry work hours are, I don't know where most would get the time to troll around forums. Even among the company I'm at (~1000 employees), the majority of the development side has never heard of GAF, and doesn't even frequent Reddit. Our free time is spent playing games