Some observations on the evolution of PR over the course of the past 12 years.
– Thank goodness for electronic image acceptance. Slides were a real bitch to have to deal with for everyone involved. This is probably the biggest step that’s been made in recent history when it comes to PR in my opinion. What used to take weeks from creation to having them in hand (and then be limited to only the manufactured slides) we can now turn around a screenshot in a matter of minutes for everyone to use and distribute it far and wide. Of note, this mostly effected print magazine (another point)
– Email – without question the antiquated ways of the fax are becoming extinct. Sure it sucks having tons of email to sift through, but we are saving lots of trees, and info is near instantaneous. If you don’t like it, a simple delete key or rule fixes everything.
– Instant Messaging. Sure, add me to your ICQ (1842068). Sadly, I haven’t been in an IRC room in too long. That stuff used to be great, now it is all Twitter, Facebook, AIM, and any of the other of messaging options.
– Media landscape. Do I need to even go into this? We’ve been riding waves of different formats for a long time. It’s been magazines, then mom-and-pop (or brother-and-sister) websites, then bigger sites again, blogs are now in play. It will be interesting to see where all this leads…
– Suits. There was once a day where everyone in the games industry was pretty much around to have fun and make games. Then money became of paramount importance and a lot more suits can be found dominating the landscape of the industry. Bringing in some high level guy from some consumer brand was a great strategy (that 9 times out of 10 has them out of the industry 6 months later). More power to you though if you can hack the game’s industry.
– E3. Wait? What? It’s back? ok. And why was it in Atlanta again?
– Retail. GameStop and Wal-Mart having so much pull means a lot. Five buyers can make or break a game or even an entire publisher. You have Target, Toys R Us and Best Buy in there too, but there was a time when there were 5x that many outlets that mattered to publishers.
– Japan ruled the day. Aside from Madden, Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam, there was once a time where almost every great game people looked forward to came from Japan, now it is almost totally opposite.
How far we’ve come…