by ZeroAerey25 . on Dec 14, 2007
It must be a slow news day. Huzzah for super-over-analyzing stuff and tying it into unrelated stories!
An interesting choice of wording in the recent legal complaint filed by Kohnke against Perpetual has led to a number of stories concerning companies influencing game reviews, which is magnified by all of the GameSpot-related drama over the Gerstmann firing. The wording in the complaint states that Kohnke was "successful in creating pre-release 'buzz' around Gods & Heroes, and in convincing reviewers to write positive reviews about the game."
WarCry got Kohnke on the line for a response, and this is what they said:
This has gotten completely blown out of proportion so I have to say something. This was nothing more than a typo in the complaint. The game was never released, so it should be clear we didn't mean "reviews," but "previews." It's a missing letter in the complaint that, unfortunately, changes the meaning of the sentence to something we never intended to suggest.
Further commentary of all the media coverage can be found at Eating Bees, Sanya Weathers' blog, where she raises a good point (Sanya is the former community director for EA Mythic):
Raise your hands if you thought a PR firm was supposed to do anything BESIDES generate positive buzz for their clients. Lordy. What a non-issue this is. Even if its not a typo, and the PR kids were going to get bonuses for actual positive reviews, I still refuse to clench my underpants up to my lungs in angst. A positive review, even from a perfectly honest journalist, is often a function of the environment in which they reviewed the product.
Read the original Kohnke contact and see the links to the other coverage over at WarCry. Have your own comments? I bet you do. Come and join the discussion.