Enough with the neogaf please. Whats next reddit and Skrillex blogs and furries fan fic?

The very first rule of PR once stuff hits the fan is to respond early and don't lie. Neither of those happened here and it has injected a ton of venom into the conversation ever since because of it.

That is a complete failure on the head of whoever is making those decisions at Bethesda. You simply can not hide from this stuff and mislead people in the digital age because when you do it only gets way way worse and fast.


GStaff has responded more in that thread than this thread if I'm not mistaken. That's the difference between official support forums and a forum where other developers are actually members and watching for lessons as how not to handle a mess like this.

I take it you don't work in PR.

The very first rule of PR is to make your company look good. I agree that early response is key there, but not necessarily honesty. Companies always bend the truth as needed to make themselves look as good as possible.

I would actually say that Bethesda's PR work on Skyrim was a raging success. The game itself has plenty of issues but they did an amazing job marketing it. They have some cleanup to do and some consumer relations to repair but I'm fully confident that when Fallout 4 hits the market it'll sell just as well as Skyrim did.

Basically, I think thats speculation and excuse making. Of the worst sort - Hey lets risk alienating and screwing our customers over so we don't miss the early cash grab.

wtf, you think THAT is a valid reason? How well was OB received by PS3 users when its release was delayed? Pretty damn well afaik.


How is this unfortunate for Bethesda? They have collected their awards and salutations, while vacationing on money they stole from me. That they took 3 months to even address the issue again is utterly unacceptable.

We are well past the age where patching sw is a novelty, so why did the PS3 have to wait for so damn long to get all these fixes? And even now the game still plays well below the standard of that other console..


So no, not unfortunate for bethesda - unfortunate for the customers.

Meanwhile while the forums and PS3 players were spinning their wheels time marched on. So don't be surprised if support for this still really flawed game is dropped at this point. The thing we should have been able to rage about since release was just how half-assed the whole game was released, but at least the PS3 community couldn't even do that as we were stuck with constant fps drops and freezing...

Thank you now you guys that praised Bethesda before need to swallow your tongues for even defending a company that said that they would fix the problem when they sold the game knowing the game was broken before its release.

From a business perspective yes. From the consumer's perspective not necessarily.

And PS3 folks were actually pretty livid about the Oblivion situation at first, I remember reading some really super angry posts on GameFAQs back in the day.

You must have been taught by a very different PR professor than I was.

The very first rule of PR is that most PR issues can be caplitalized on by responding swiftly and actually resolving the issue. Ever had a business mess something up and then go out of their way to fix it? More often than not you make long term customers that way (Read, "Raving Fans", it's a good book for this stuff).

As far was what to say to consumers, you need to respond appropriately and try to ensure that only the necessary information is released. Honesty is vital, but openeness can sometimes hurt the situation.

The only time you release all the information is if it isn't as bad as people think or if the knowledge prevents a larger fallout later.

That's pre-digital-age thinking. You can't spin things without getting caught these days.

But if anything that only speaks to how out of touch Bethesda is from the top-down when it comes to modern game development and online communities.

Your absolutely right that's where we are headed now if things like this are allowed to persist.

+


If we could take a time machine and relive the delayed release on ps3 versus the mess this has become I don't think they even compare.

That imo makes it a BAD business decision.

Actually my comment there had nothing to do with bugs or patching or anything else. Just that I see the industry shifting that way. A pretty solid number of games these days are only available via online purchase and download and I think the industry is going to keep shifting in that direction. In another decade physical game media will probably only exist on rare occasions.

They did fix the problem.

But I think we all knew awhile back that there's no way QA could have missed something so big. It's good to know the truth now, at least.
Lying is now bad, yes, but knowing how much information to release is the new mode.

In this whole disaster, Bethesda handled things pretty poorly. I think we would have been happier knowing up from the getgo what the problem was. But I don't know if they knew fully what it was until they started getting those save files.

It would have been nice to know what spells to avoid and such.

I was actually foreshadowing on another point but i also hear what your saying about the digital age I am saying also that things like this will continue to persist because of the digital age hence why we are only allowed to play ps2 games from digital download but not allowed to actually play the physical game if you do not own a launch edition ps3

[img]http://i.imgur.com/HA5in.png[/img]

I think we can probably all agree that at the very least the PS3 port was rushed. I'm sure they were absolutely swamped with all kinds of bugs they were working on and just couldn't possibly get everything fixed in time to get the game out the door on the promised release date and other things got assigned a higher priority than this.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/121/1218881p1.html?_cmpid=ign40 Just something to read.
Bethesda Knew About Skyrim PS3 Issues Pre-Release

I didnt say they did or didn't fix the problem what i said was that they lied altogether and knew that there was a problem with the game thinking that it would only affect a small amount of the consumers purchasing the product.

This biggest problem was their failure to accurate gauge the effect of this particular bug. Bug prioritization is everything when it comes to project management in the software industry. It sounds like they made and estimation that was wrong and stepped out on it hard.

The way I was taught is to be as honest as possible, get it out in the open, and make sure it's accurate.

*shrug*

Well, I think they "lied" in that they did not announce the problem.

I think they honestly thought it'd be fixed before anyone really cared. Just bad estimation on their part. The truth is, though, no software company releases their bug list before selling the product. So I don't know what more we expected (given the condition that they didn't know how big the problem was, if they knew then it would have been a cold blooded lie).

Yeah I'm not implying that PR can't/won't lie but rather that when they do it's called-out within hours if not minutes with multiple articles, videos, interviews, podcasts, links and whatever else directly contradicting whatever the PR BS is.

The end result is far more damaging than just being open and honest and you simply can not look-to PR practices from a decade or two ago and expect them to fly these days. It's one of those things where if your PR people are still operating in that manner then they need some retraining so that they fully understand how the internet works.

".Speaking to Kotaku at the DICE summit in LA last week, Bethesda's Todd Howard has admitted that the publisher was aware of problems with the PS3 version of Skyrim before release, but thought that "only a small percentage" of players would be affected. "

I know I'm late on the ball to this information, mainly because I'm so heavily into Kingdoms of Amalur right now.
I got up this morning, found a few articles and read the statement and paused a bit- letting it sink in.

There is a HUGE difference between releasing a game with a few minor bugs, and trying to cover up a MAJOR
issue within the game itself simply on the basis that it MIGHT only affect a few people. It'd be like if a company
released a few cellphones that, after so many days, would run into issues just to place a call- and this issue
would be affecting a good sum of people (enough to spike a huge press fiasco).

I'm not going to rationalize this. I'm not going to MAKE UP excuses for them. This shouldn't BE defended.
This is a problem with how developers are treating their customers. This isn't a "bad estimation", this is getting
away with sending out a faulty product. And while I'm sure there are plenty of users out there that DON'T have
problems with Skyrim, that means NOTHING to the users who have.

That quote has since been clarified by Bethesda - they did actually try to fix it before release and thought they had done so.

Of course they're going to say that. I don't believe it for a moment yeah they might have tried to fix but they know and we know they didn't and they know they didn't before release.