Nirolak said:
One company's shitty policies do not excuse another company's shitty policies. This is the long road to damnation people are far too willing to walk.
The film industry is also not a good comparison. Movies do not have gameplay. Even if you're a story driven adventure game, the experience of playing your game should be worthwhile and appealing. If the experience of playing your game is so uncompelling that people would not want to play it after choosing to see the ending on YouTube, the problem is not the YouTube video they watched.
You are right, of course; what I was saying was more that there are practices out there far more worrying than Square Enix's blocking of home (or office) brewed screens and video. That practice is something that varies greatly - if you're a big site or a person/publication that Square Enix's PR trust, they'll be quick to dish out special dispensation and let you do what you want.
I think they are worried about smaller or less-professional sites presenting sup-par video, but the problem there is they deal with the issue in a sweeping manner - mass banning YouTube videos rather than individually asking "is this video harmful?" It's an incredibly weird practice. Out of interest, J-GAF - are SE Japan as hot on pulling down NicoNico videos and the like?
DiscoJer said:
Well, I think many companies do simply think of the gaming media as an extension of their PR.
One of the things that has been pissing me off lately is over at Siliconera, how they've been teasing announcements of Xseed's (apparent) bringing over of Falcom's stuff.
For instance:
http://www.siliconera.com/2010/05/07/your-ticket-is-here/
Seems to me, if you are really a journalist, you publish news. Or you don't. You don't tease stuff like that just because a company tells you to. That's viral marketing.
This is a wider issue that could be discussed in great detail. There's a few forces at play here. First of you've got smaller sites vying for attention, invites to events and review code, and in order to compete they often feel the need to big-up and post junk stories about that company so they can ram an email choc-full of "content links" to show they're worthwhile.
The other side is friendship, I think. For me personally there's been a few times with Nippon Ichi where I've stretched editorially what I'm meant to have reported on to squeeze a news story about one of their games where it doesn't technically belong.
Why? Because I like those guys. I like their PR team, and I like the company and most of the games they put out. Obviously you can't let friendship effect any opinion piece or review - if they put out a shit game, then it'll get reviewed as shit, and the email sending the review clipping/link will express a bit of regret that we didn't like it - but like I say I have stretched for news stories and stuff because I like those guys. They've not pressured me to do it at all, but the press release comes down and I feel compelled to try to help them because they're cool and human beings where many of the PR people you find out there are marketing robots.
That said, you wouldn't catch me posting that kind of viral marketing stuff you see above. It has no value whatsoever.