Tom Ohle: about cancellation of ROWW
http://evolutionofpr.com/?p=92spotted on http://twitter.com/EvolveTomAh, the economy. Obama was supposed to fix it, but amazingly, even Superpresident himself can’t halt a global economic freefall in 100 days. Too bad, for a sound and stable economy would have made last Wednesday a little more enjoyable for me… or maybe a bit less chaotic. You see, the state of the economy is to blame for some layoffs we had to make at CD Projekt RED — we didn’t have to fire hundreds or thousands of people like a lot of other companies did, but nevertheless we were affected. Those layoffs spawned at least one disgruntled employee who felt the need to reach out to media to expose what was/is a very fragile situation in the development of The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf.On Tuesday I started getting emails about it: “I heard the game was cancelled; any comment?” The source of the rumor was a reputable Polish website, once again proving that no matter where news happens, it will eventually find its way to the masses; good job, Internet. As a communicator, this is a pretty crummy situation. I knew in general terms what was happening behind the scenes — namely that development had been suspended because we weren’t confident that the game could be delivered on time at the level of quality we require. But making a statement to that effect takes a lot of planning — you have to consider legal situations (i.e. we’re just the developer and can’t make any sort of announcement without the publisher’s consent), timing, exact phrasing, etc.So normally all of this stuff should be settled through proper business channels, and we were content to let that happen. We had to pull out one of my least favorite tactics in the Grand Ol’ Book of PR Tactics — the “no comment” — but within a few days the story would surely become less newsworthy, allowing us to craft a proper statement. Then on Wednesday morning, our development partner actually issued a press release and conducted interviews laying blame for the situation on us.Weeeeeeeeeee! is the sound that spewed from my mouth and every other orifice — some sort of gaseous escape caused by sudden panic and my insides going, “ah shit, man.” I’m not sure why it happened, but nevertheless the headlines of “Witcher not seeing consoles because CD Projekt can’t pay developers” weren’t sitting well with any of us. I had to keep offering up “no comment” responses to the accusations, even as the full extent of the development situation became clearer to me. Compound my inability to make a statement with the fact that discussions about the situation were taking place halfway around the world in Poland, where the rest of CD Projekt is based… and, well, I wasn’t having a great day.This is one of the greatest dilemmas in a PR rep’s day — you have journalists, many of whom are friends, asking you to respond to rather unsavory accusations, and you can’t give them a straight answer. Then the stories — rightfully so — turn to “Company will not deny the rumors, leading us to believe they’re true.” And now, as a PR rep, you’re in a position you don’t want to be in: other people are controlling your messaging for you. It sucks to watch people drag your name through the mud… even consumers who see only one side of the story start to change their opinions of your company. And even if you have a chance to eventually address the rumors formally, a number of those consumers are bound to miss the news update, and their opinion of your organization may have been negatively affected forever.Case in point: we still haven’t made a formal statement about the situation. CD Projekt’s Joint CEO, Michal Kicinski, posted a response in the comment section one of the original stories, and a number of sites went back and adjusted their posts to reflect our side of things. But not all of them. I’m sure there are still a lot of journos out there that haven’t seen his comment, and those journalists’ readers, by extension, still have a very one-sided view of the situation.Crisis communication isn’t fun. What it does, though, is give us a quick kick in the ass and test our ability to keep cool. It would be so easy to just blast an email to my media contacts or put up a post on a forum explaining the whole situation. But that would be stupid, right?
