In the video game business, gamers often have a healthy amount of distrust for the companies that publish the titles they buy. It's not an unreasonable reaction; after all, every gamer can remember a time or two when he or she felt deceived by a publisher after buying a game that was far less impressive than how it had been advertised. Not only that, but deceptive PR campaigns like "All I Want for Xmas is a PSP" and the new program surrounding Dante's Inferno have done little to make it seem that companies are interested in being honest with their consumers.
Larger companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Electronic Arts seem to have realized this, and have spent the past few years working to strengthen their relationships with gamers. Part of this campaign has been an effort to put out better games. Publishers have also been establishing positions for bloggers to give gamers an inside look at the companies they represent. These "first-party bloggers" are currently few, but their presence is undeniable in the industry. Individuals like Jeff Rubenstein of the PlayStation Blog, Larry Hryb of Microsoft, and Jeff Green of EA are some of the bigger names in this new field; even though they're well-known, there's still a fair amount of mystery surrounding what they actually do.
If there's one thing for certain, it's that no two of these first-party blogging jobs is the same. Larry Hryb's blog is designed to give readers an inside look at what goes on within Microsoft's Xbox company divisions. As a result, his blog posts and podcasts have bought him into the public eye over the years; he's become one of the biggest names within the industry, reporting new developments about Xbox LIVE and occasionally being the source of news, like when Microsoft announced its warranty extension on Xbox 360s.
Meanwhile, Jeff Rubenstien's position with Sony is similar, but different: instead of talking to the general public, he strives to interact with gamers on a personal level. According to Rubenstein, "my overriding goal is to connect our customers with the people who make the games they love. This effort spans a number of formats, from the PlayStation.Blog, to social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook, down to in-person meet-ups in cities around the country. But in the end, it's all about providing access."
Unsurprisingly, these aren't exactly jobs that one just falls into. As previously mentioned, Hryb's current status evolved out of reactions to his blog and the podcasts he released. Rubenstein and Green, on the other hand, had very different jobs before they landed their current positions; both have significant backgrounds in journalism.
For Hryb, arguably the most senior veteran in this field, the opportunity to join the Xbox LIVE team came along out of a conversation with a friend at Microsoft. "I had been at Microsoft for more than 3 years when a friend of mine told about the opening at Xbox LIVE," he explained to Ars. "I chatted with him and realized after looking at the vision the team had that this was where I wanted to be. As Xbox LIVE grew, so did my role and reach. I started blogging in 2004 before many gaming companies were even thinking like that. Now, it's expected of a game developer to have a blog. One of the ways I've had success is that I look to the community to find out where they are and I go to them... Facebook, Twitter, or whatever the next big thing is."
For Rubenstein, the opportunity to work in the games industry came along a bit unexpectedly. Up until the summer of 2007, he was working for the Orlando Sentinel. "Among other things, I was heavily involved with the paper's blogging initiatives at the time [when Sony approached me with a job offer]" he explained. "I've had a lifelong interest in gaming, and I jumped at the opportunity."
Jeff Green, meanwhile, has been involved with video games since 1996, when he became an associate editor for Computer Gaming World (which eventually evolved into Games For Windows before Ziff Davis shut it down in April 2008). After the magazine's closure, Green left Ziff Davis's ranks that following September and went to work for Electronic Arts in order to contribute to the Sims franchise. At that time, Green felt he needed a break from straight journalism.
"It was a rough transition," he told Ars. "But I knew I wanted to do something different I needed a break from gaming press, I wanted to do writing in a creative field." Among other work, he wrote for titles like SimAnimals, SimAnimals 2 and MySims Agents, but even this form of writing wasn't quite what he was looking for.
On his personal blog, Green offers a detailed explanation of how he wound up as the Editor-in-Chief of EA.com., beginning with how he was starting to feel frustrated and unfulfilled by his then-current position. With the encouragement of a friend at EA, he decided to pitch his idea for a podcast when he realized the company didn't actually have one. Once the podcast got off the ground, he and co-host Samantha LaPerre realized that the website itself had a ton of underutilized potential.
"Looking around the Web, I saw a lot of other sites—not in gaming—providing their own original content that was entertaining, along with their other properties that were the point of their existence," Green explained to Ars. "I felt like EA, this huge company with an incredibly rich history of games, was not doing a good job of celebrating itself on the Web. If I wanted to find out stuff about classic EA games, I had to go to fan sites or Wikipedia, which I thought was ridiculous. So that was my pitch: let me come over here, bring what I learned in my years in journalism, and make this website a place people want to go because it's a cool website, not because we're just trying to sell them something."
While it might be tempting to dismiss these bloggers' efforts as nothing more than yet another corporate tactic to fool the masses, these guys know that they can't try to mess with their fans. "Our readers would be able to sniff that out pretty quickly," says Rubenstein.
"Gamers are super good at reading through BS," Green agreed. "They have excellent filters for that. You can't fool them. I don't want to; that would just fail."
Accordingly, it's crucial that these officials be fans of what they're promoting. "Part of the reason I decided to take the job at SCEA is because I believe in the product," Rubenstein confirmed. "I've been a PlayStation fan since '95, and when I get home from work, you can bet that I'll be on my PS3 enjoying the very same things that we're promoting all day. Knowing that the games back up the talk make it easy to be honest in this job."
Of course, this doesn't mean that bloggers like Green, Hryb, and Rubenstein aren't parts of the publicity machine. But they operate very differently from typical PR and marketing departments. According to Rubenstein, "We've got a different viewpoint than the rest of the team, and that can come in handy."
"For instance, we might find an interesting angle to a game or a developer that the PR team might not have considered," he explained. Our position also has us talking to a huge cross-section of the industry... we're a major source of news for gaming media, but we're also directly speaking to—and listening to—the customers."
For Hryb, the line between what he does and the rest of the marketing department can be blurred sometimes, mainly because, "I'm wearing multiple hats. I can go from producing content for Inside Xbox, to a meeting to discuss how we make Xbox LIVE or Xbox.com better and then off to attend or host a community event."
The real difference, though, is that Hryb's an active member of the LIVE community across the globe. He's often a very real and accessible face for the service. "I can use my voice to get the message not only from Xbox across to the community, but to also listen and get the message from the community heard at Xbox," he said. "I also watch where the conversations are taking place and make sure that I represent Xbox in those areas as best as possible."
For Hryb, being the unofficial representative for Xbox LIVE was especially important this past summer, when he was invited to Iraq for ten days as the host of the I-RoqBaghdad tournament at Camp Liberty. "It was one of the highlights of my life," he stated. "Living with the men and women of the military and seeing the job they do each and every day really makes you appreciate what we have in terms of freedom."
Ultimately, while first-party bloggers are relatively new to the industry, they are also unique because they are single-handedly increasing the transparency of their companies. As a result, they're changing the relationship between consumers and publishers by helping establish a sense of trust with the former for the latter. So far, it seems like their efforts are definitely helping further this goal, but it remains to be seen if this will still be the case in the future, provided more companies embrace the idea and try to do the same.
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