#June2013
E3 vs PR – Part III: Microsoft Monday and Mixed Messages
Let’s talk about how important Monday was for determining the game industry’s narrative for the coming months.
Let’s also talk about what it means to gamers like you, and me, and how industry giants like Microsoft and Sony communicated with us via the grand stage of E3.
Monday saw PR-beleageured Microsoft take the stage first, around 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time. There’s no beating around the bush – they had an uphill battle to wage, one very much set up by their own PR snafoos over the last month.
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E3 vs PR – Part I: XBox One – How Microsoft let their key moment get ‘xboned’
Welcome to E3 vs PR – A blog series on the Gaming Industry’s Most Important Season from a Communications Perspective.
You’re having a bad PR week with the media if you’re one of the following two clients:
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, following allegations of crack-cocaine use caught on tape, or, Microsoft’s Games and Entertainment Division, following the incredibly confused and poorly communicated debut of their next generation platform, the Xbox One (XBO).
I’m a gamer. Have been since I was 3. I’m also an upcoming communications and PR graduate. The lens I’m looking at this industry through is changing radically, but the last week has been bad enough that the popular opinion is all on the same side.
We all threw our hands up at Microsoft’s lack of a coherent set of key messages throughout the eight days since launch. Everything we’ve been taught not to do, they’re doing.
While Microsoft didn’t match Ford and (allegedly) break the law over the last poorly-planned eight days of the XBO PR launch, you’d definitely call most of their actions criminal, from a communications perspective.
A game and entertainment console ‘reveal’ is one of the most critical and risk-laden PR events that can take place in the interactive entertainment industry. A console, like the XBO’s predecessor, the XBox 360, typically lives on the market for a healthy five to six years. That’s before being relegated to second-tier status upon its successor’s launch for the next three or four years.
