Also, here's a transcript of the AC3 Flag discussion for those who don't feel like listening to a 3 and a half hour podcast:
Jeff - Yeah. As people kind of - as this outrage builds around this stuff, and more different aspects of our line of work get roped into it, you see people saying like, "oh, they sent t-shirts to this guy, so obviously..." or what is it? It's the stupid fucking flag that came with Assassins Creed 3, which when it showed up at our office, we made fun of it for being kind of fucked up to modify the American flag.
Brad - Here's what happened with the flag. It showed up in the mail. We thought it was fucking stupid. You proposed the idea of burning it on video. While that had a certain appeal to it, I don't know about the rest of you guys, I am not comfortable of any imagery of burning the American flag, even if it's this crass, corporate perversion of it.
jeff - yeah
Brad - the symbolism is still there. So ultimately, we sneered at the thing for five minutes and then shoved it under a desk and I totally forgot we had it until all this stuff came back up. So that is the amount of influence that something like that has. It's a waste of their marketing budget and our time.
Jeff - Stupid shit shows up at this office all the time.
Ryan - Constantly
Brad - Usually not of that caliber, where there's a marketing executive on the letterhead, going "Thanks!"
Jeff - Yeah. Jesus. "Thanks for your coverage." I mean what the fuck is that about?
Patrick - Assassin's Creed three, last week showed up. The limited edition in the giant-ass box. Ryan comes in at the end of the day, rips it open, grabs the copy of the game and throws the rest of the box into a corner with the stack of shit we have and then just left, so he could finish reviewing it. How else are we supposed to handle that?
Vinny - not that there's not people out there - I mean, I don't want it to sound callous, like "nobody wants this stuff," but you want to do you job, you want the game so you can review the product.
Ryan - I think we have a certain level of cynicism and it's a certain level that's earned. We've been around long enough that we've seen, "oh, they're sending us the big crazy edition," well, I don't need any more statues for my desk so here, Sara, you take that, I don't care. I just want the game part out of this giant box. Hey belt buckle! anyone want a belt buckle? no? throwing it in the box, putting it in the corner. There is this constant.... we are this membrane through which all videogames pass. Along with those games is usually some dumb - some bauble, some trinket, some something that
Jeff - For Bejewled they send a big plastic fake diamond!
Ryan - yeah remember that? That was dumb. What are you gonna do with that?
Jeff - Put it in a drawer somewhere and then 8 months later find it and be like, "why the fuck do I still have this thing?"
[discussion snipped of all the junk that was left at the old office]
Brad - The time I feel better about that stuff showing is up is the times when we can turn it into some dumb video. Like the time that the 3DS showed up, and we were like, let's invite everybody else into this bizarre world and see exactly what's going on here.
Jeff - Let's be straight-up with it. This life is, it's fucking weird. This line of work is fucking. weird. Videogames are not becoming a smaller business, but in a lot of ways, they're beoming a slightly more desperate, hit-driven, business. As a result, you have people pulling out all the stops and and going like, with the 3DS - Let's get this train of girls to show up.
Patrick - You also have to take into account the way - this doesn't apply to us, but applies to the way that a lot of other game sites cover things - every time they pull a gimmick, you see these threads of people posting press kits, and all this weird swag. That's potentially a blog post, or a twitter mention. A lot of that marketing material is going into, "If we can get one more hit about this game with these people that are influential to consumers." We just throw that aside, because that's not what - we don't really do unboxings and things like that unless it's like
Jeff - obviously we occasionally do, but they're few and far between, but it's gotta be interesting.
Partick - It has to make sense for us. It's not going to be a regular piece of coverage, whereas, that is a regular piece of coverage for sites like the Kotakus of the world that need to have posts like every 20 minutes and this stuff fills it.
Ryan - We don't do unboxing of limited editions of games
Jeff - We do unboxings of things that users send us. Like flashlight tasers. We didn't even do an unboxing of that, and it had a Commodore 64 in that box and - DJ, thank you for sending that box!
Brad - How did we not record the stun gun?
Jeff - because I opened it after you guys were already gone.
Brad - We have been doing this website so raw for so long, that I would like to think that people are confident that we are not feeding them a line of bullshit about anything.
Jeff - To be straight up about it, if you feel like you can't trust us, go out and find another website. You should be asking these questions of people. We try to be transparent. It's weird. This is something I've spent a whole fucking lot of time thinking about. you know - are we crossing the line? how do people view the site, because we're trying to do more personal coverage. We're trying to talk to people that make the games. We're trying to do interviews that are more than just "so what platform is your game coming out on and when is it out?" As a result, we have cultivated this crew of people that you see on the site on a fairly regular basis.