That is the phrase that appears in the Watchdog advertisements, along with a QR code leading to a secret website with more game information. In recent years, the importance of social media advertising has risen to a critical point. It’s become a necessary process in the advertising of games in particular, with marketing and social media exposure often determining the fate of a game, regardless of its quality. This opens up new routes for game developers and publishers, but it also implements some new marketing and customer service standards: if you do a bad job with either, it could cause the game to bomb, or worse—cause a backlash against the company doing the development or marketing. But is that really a negative thing?
Of course, there are plenty of positives to the significance of social media—it brings a company closer to its users, encourages continuous gameplay or raises the replay value, it opens up a new platform for indie developers to get their game out on the market, and brings the community and the developers together in a way that wasn’t exactly possible before the internet. All of these positive attributes are perhaps what has led the gaming industry to thrive as we move into the digital age—word-of-mouth advertising and personal accounts of the game became much more proliferous and available as internet users became more frequent, and this could easily have boosted sales.
The only real negatives of social media’s relationship with gaming are not felt through the players and consumers, but rather the companies that attempt it. Bad customer service causes a backlash, sloppy game design and development enrages fans, and any shady practices by companies can leak and become impossible to contain on the internet. If a customer receives a bad e-mail, you can be guaranteed a screenshot of it will spread around quickly. If a company attempts to monopolize games by giving an exorbitant amount for exclusivity—or even requiring game exclusiveness (yes, I am talking about the XBOX 360 here, though it could apply to plenty of other companies)—of course it would make the community frown and those companies could lose customers over it.
Games which do not have a large online base are likely to get overlooked by not just media, but the increasing amount of customers who use that media for news. Regardless of the game’s quality, if there is no hype or exposure surrounding it, it will fall flat. A mention in one of the major gaming magazines is no longer enough to propel a game into the spotlight. At the same time, this same negative allows indie games to achieve popularity and support.
While these issues are a negative for companies, they are all beneficial to customers and gaming communities—it encourages company transparency, requires customer service to show some etiquette, brings the gaming community closer to the source of the games, and even brings the gaming community closer to each other. The internet gave many gamers who couldn’t otherwise access the community a way to get together and talk about their favorite games—and that community is the driving force of what determines whether a social media marketing attempt is successful or not.
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