Veldrynus wrote:@ Corribus
Lol, your example is completely irrelevant. You're absolutely unable to get my point. Pathetic...
I get your point. I'm not stupid. You don't get mine. I understand the "No such thing as bad publicity" myth. I.e., even if it's something bad, it gets your name out there in the news and it's on everyone's mind. And somehow they magically forget the negative connotations that were associated with the publicity in the first place.
That's nonsense. There's such a thing as bad publicity, and it can kill a product. And it can seriously hurt a company. It happens all the time, and you're kidding yourself if you think it doesn't exist. Want a real example? Ever hear of Vioxx? Vioxx was a 2.5 BILLION dollar a year arthritis drug manufactured by the pharmaceutical giant, Merck. Some time ago it was discovered that users of Vioxx were at an increased risk of heart disease. Enter a enormous recall of the drug, thousands of lawsuits, implications of intentional wrongdoing, and you have what David Schmitten at Wharton calls "a crisis of financial confidence. Investors, business partners, suppliers, management, and employees - will they stick with the company?" Indeed, after Merck's decision to remove Vioxx from the market, their share prices dropped from $45.07 to $33 a share
in one day and hovered there for quite some time. And this all from a company with a
good reputation.
Now, please, I'd like for you to explain to me how that is good publicity.
What you don't seem to understand is that bad publicity is real and companies will avoid it. Yes there are times when something bad in the news might be "good publicity" because it gets the name out there, but implications that your computer game is going to be shipped well before it's playable and without several advertised features, published on the biggest online gaming news site in the world, is not good publicity. Publicity is all about consumer confidence. Bad publicity can shake that confidence and seriously disrupt business.
Ubisoft is in the delicate position right now of trying to attract people to a game whose last instalment was a basic disaster and coincided with its publishers filing of bankrupcy. There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of the title and the last thing Ubisoft no doubt wants is anything that might scare people away from this already damaged brand name. Everything that Ubisoft has done so far has virtually been the definition of of caution and conservatism, not the least of which was the decision to completely DUMP every single thing that could be associated with H4. Much to the chagrin of many Heroes fans everywhere. But as I've tried to stress, this has all been about restoring consumer confidence in the brand name. That's what they've been doing all along and that's what they're going to try to do all the way through the publication of this game and (undoubtedly) forthcoming expansion packs.
With that in mind, this strategy will likely pay dividends, because Ubisoft is not likely to blithely ignore the united protests of all the major fan sites, especially when they generate bad publicity on major gaming sites. To do so would not be in character with all of their other actions surrounding the development of this game. What Angelspit and the other site administrators have done is capitalize on this tenuous position in a move that is likely to yield results and will likely get you a better game than if we all just sat around sucking our thumbs.
Frankly you should all be thanking him.
"What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" - Richard P. Feynman
