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Online Reputation Control firms
k-damage
Member CommonPosts: 738
I know some of you already know, but I thought it should've been brought to light.
A lot of people (including me) were wondering why new products were the target of so many more trolls, compulsive bashers, or even radical fanboys in MMO/Videogame forums since a few years. I'm browsing VG forums since well ... since internet became popular (mid 90's), and for the life of me never were there so many mindlessly product bashing posts like this before (emphasis on "mindlessly", as in "not even justified").
There can be a lot of reasons for this growth, including increased internet userbase, and of course mmo flaws combined with high player expectations. But there might be another reality kicking in : Online Reputation Control services.
For a certain amount of money, such a company engages itself in either deleting bad reviews on your product, either post fake good ones, or even post fake bad ones about concurrent's forums & review sites.
wiki : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_reputation_management
I won't put direct links to the most visible companies, but just try a Google Search with "reputation control management". Or just try a Google News search with "Fake reviews".
If you browsed the services list of these companies, they are promoting positive fake reviews. Although don't fool yourself, discrimination may be illegal, and I don't know about those linked above, but you can imagine that there are also companies who provide negative fake reviews. If they can do the good fake reviews, they can do the bad, right ? They just don't advertise it publicly.
Think about it, it's a logical fact : look at MMOs. They now cost a third of a billion to make, and with the amount of new mmos spreading each year, it's either they succeed in hooking as many players right at release, either they're forgotten, hence a failure. That, and considering how investor dependant are videogame developments, the less popularity, the less investment over time. So word of mouth is grossly what decides a MMO ability to recover its development cost ... then when you have so much money to recover, I think it's not a good, but an expected behaviour from big publishers to hire such services as above.
Why do I create a thread about it ? Not only because I feel it's bad practice by principle, but mostly because in some way (and this is just my opinion), I think it can cause the end of what forums were great for, in the long term : fresh user point of views, honest debates, etc.
I clearly see such companies as an indirect fatal harm towards videogame community in general, or any gamer blog you were trusting before : the more people will be aware of such companies (and it has already hit the news, so they will be), the less trust they will put in any forum poster/blogger they're not close to. It's inevitable, trust is not something you put out of your ass. And how do you become close with a forum poster ? By starting to put your trust in selected unknown ones.
What is your opinion about this whole inevitable business ?
edit : If you have witnessed any of those bashing/praising agents, don't hesitate to share here. The only detail I'd like not to be mentionned would be the agent's contractor, so that this thread doesn't turn into an indirect anti-marketing campaign itself.
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Comments
Is it all "hush hush don't speak about that" or what ?
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Alas, you can't really prevent it, you can only continue to approach online discussions with a healthy skepticism of peoples' motives. I tend to think that the best defense against it is simply the cost:benefit ratio - given that I'm going to see fans and haters and front page articles anyway, is my opinion really worth the cost of having someone covertly pitching me and sending propaganda targetting the narrow collection of forums I read?
no one spends money bashing video games. that's the delusion of fanboys, nothing more.
I do however accept donations.That's what I'd like to think too. But we saw in the past how much control marketing did want to have on its visibility.
There are already companies specialized and highly active in Damage Control, Public Relation, Internal Communication, or simply Branding. They all do the same thing as Online Reputation Control, which is to build an image from the ground even if it's distorted reality, and they're all very proactive in today's society.
So in such a control freak world, I can perfectly see some big publishers trying all that is possible to manage the incidence of popularity over their production investment costs.
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I expect that many MMO companies do invest in resources both in-house and out-sourced to post positive reviews and spin about thier products (anonymously) and to try to counter or get removed negative reviews. Negative posts on competitors sites are probably much more limited if they occur at all.... simply because it's an inefficient allocation of resources.
In a market like the one which currently exists for MMO's, just because you dissuade someone from trying out a competitors product doesn't translate into that individual trying out YOURS. They could turn to a different compititor (it IS a pretty darn crowded market out there) ...or simply not decide to play an MMO at all and move thier interest to a different type of game or possibly into a different sort of hobby entirely.
Thus on a pound for pound basis, it's far less efficient to spend resources try to push someone away from a competitor then it is to try to pull them toward your product. If it was as cut and dried as a Coke vs Pepsi dynamic...then you might see more negative marketing tactics...but that's rarely the case with MMO's or games in general. There are just too many alternatives out there for peoples liesure time.
Once again, if one can spend money to boost his product, why wouldn't he spend money to bash a concurrent ? In the end, half-full or half-empty glass, the effect is the same ?
If you want a start of a hint, just type "fake negative reviews" in Google search.
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You're totally right in most domains. But if I may, MMO are an exception : MMOs are so expensive to produce that you don't see a big new one more than once a year. So when one new enters, he only has one future direct competitor, two at most (considering the "success at launch of fail" as explained in the OP). The choice that is left to playerbase when one said MMO is pinned down is rather obvious : "the other next big thing".
But for sure, there might be far more fake positive reviews than negative ones, I concur.
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Rest assured that if any companies are doing this, its big ones like NCsoft, EA, and Blizzard. Alot of MMORPGs are from indy developers who struggle just to get their game noticed, rather then spending money on bashing the opponents.
MMORPG's have always attracted the more intelligent folk of the world populace... or at least it used to, and most intelligent people can tell the difference between opinions, lies, and facts.
If people are going to buy a game or not, they are most likely going to youtube a video of it, or ask a friend etc.
Those rating websites are more geared towards stuff that you can't just look up on youtube, like resteraunt rating. No youtube video can show you what a resteraunts food tastes like, how friendly their servers are, and how pleasent the temperature and ambience is. But you can find out MOST of what a video game has to offer by a video.
There may be some Blizzard people bashing opponents or whatever, but are they really that effective? I doubt it. A youtube video will correct any lies any of those agencies spread.
Now, if a review site or magazine is taking bribes from companies to write a review a certain way, thats a different story. But these companies that spam their way to alter the ratings, that won't work for MMORPGs.
I think companies do it in both directions, and probably (and sad to say), if you try to be ethical, you just hurt your bottom line...A lot of people are on the fence at times on which game to play, so they probably target direct competition, and do not mess with people they deem to be inconseqential...
This isn't just games, it's all corporations that are marketing things, that have competitors...
That is why people on forums generally try to find posters they think are credible, and then they listen to them a little more...People use to use join dates, and these companies were proactive in that too....I have seen accounts that are 3-4 years old on here go on a advertisement spree as their only posts....So you have sleeper accounts made to spring into action, I would say the smart ones try to be less obvious....
So I would say, find people you think are legit, and if anything is too negative, and the language is too biased, I wouldn't use it...The same for news articles, product reviews, and so forth... If you use biased language, you are not being fair... Not to say some people are not being truthful that do, it is just better to find something not as biased to feel you are getting the true sense of something.
It seems like the OP is a viral marketeer. Oh and my trolling of SWG was because THEY SCREWED US CUSTOMERS OVER!
These Reputation fixers are all crap, make a good product and your customers won't complain.
--When you resubscribe to SWG, an 18 yearold Stripper finds Jesus, gives up stripping, and moves with a rolex reverend to Hawaii.
--In MMORPG's l007 is the opiate of the masses.
--The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence!
--CCP could cut off an Eve player's fun bits, and that player would say that it was good CCP did that.
What ? So bringing a concrete proof to a case study is viral marketing ? It seems like you didn't read the OP at all, apart from the shiny blue links.
__________
Anyway, I'm happy to see other posters putting down mature and well thought opinion, thanks guys
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HAH!!!!! Busted.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
If I knew I would attract all paranoid tinfoil psychos here ... Anyway, I'm suppressing those links in the OP, if it can help you sleep at night.
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I think people take reviews way too seriously. Yes there's probably some fake reviews. I don't know why people make a big deal out of it.
I can see this happening and I believe it probably does but its not someting I am going to worry about since you cannot tell the reasons or motivations behind someone posting. If anything it seems like that line of reasoning is an excuse to dismiss someone's arguement that you do not agree with right up their with fanboy or hater.
Took from another thread :
Originally posted by sidhaethe
On 4chan /vg/ (I know), someone with a registered name admitted to being a viral marketer for **** (edited) and that some of what they did consisted of thread-crapping including bashing GW2.
So I'll bump this thread by adding : If you have witnessed any of those bashing/praising agents, don't hesitate to share here. The only detail I'd like not to be mentionned would be the agent's contractor so that this thread doesn't turn into an indirect anti-marketing campaign itself.
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The effect isn't the same.
The effect isn't even close.
$50,000 ad budget spent on hyping your game gets results.
$50,000 spent bashing your competitors would achieve almost nothing overall, and definitely wouldn't achieve anything for the competiting product.
You don't piss away ad budget blindly. If the return on investment doesn't happen in the form of $50,000 or more new revenue coming in to your business, you're just throwing money away.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Valid point, except it is assuming there are several serious competitors. But as I wrote earlier in the thread, most serious MMOs are not releasing the same year. And if they are, you can still narrow it to one because MMO gamers won't play two at once, and will chose the best of all upcoming releases.
So concretely, there is always one serious competitor per year against the current MMO superstar. Which can be the said target of negative reviewing. It's not that complicated to find the highest competitor to a superstar, really, you just have to look at the most hyped.
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If you only have 50k to spend then you don't want to spend it only on bashing your opponent, but you could spend 49k on adverts and 1k on bashing. That extra 1k won't get you a much better ad campaign, but it might sway people enough people to make it worth wild to bash the competition.
How much mud slinging isn't being done in politcal campaigns. I see no difference to be honest.
So by that logic, any MMO company that did this would aim for Wow, as they are easily the biggest competitior. And conversly, since even with the drop off they've had, Blizzard is still drowning in money, they would have NO need to go after all the small fish that are their competition.
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
I think that Wow is getting this kind of paid bashing. It's just that the game is so popular, official / non-official forums are so massive in post counts, that it would request an insane amount of budget for such an action to be 1) efficient, 2) recognizable.
When you are a "small fish", or a newcomer with no big marketing budget, in this case it would be far easier to aim at "everyone else but WoW".
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Again I say this makes no sense. Since you can't harm your biggest potential rival, going after sub rivals is idiotic as it will just be wasted effort as even if you are successful, people are far more likely to go back to said biggest rival than come to your game.
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
There is a company for about anything...as much to your google findings.
There is way more logical explanation for trolls: There are way less people capable and/or willing of constructive, intelligent discussion than trolls.
People are bitching stupidly about anything so they do also about games. Not an intention, just human nature.