Marketing

Hariram Satkunarajan

The Impact of PR on a Game’s Performance

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Hariram Satkunarajan is a fourth-year Professional Communications student at Toronto Metropolitan University. Throughout his years in study, he has grown a diverse skillset that he plans to bring forward into the communications field, with the intent of both utilizing every tool at his disposal, and expanding upon his current skillset. He is interested in the public relations field as a whole, but also wants to expand more towards crisis communications, and possibly corporate communications. His ideal career path would be working as a communications specialist in any sort of technological sector, or in any gaming, film, or television adjacent sector, where he can contribute towards industries that are relevant to media he’s passionate about.

The aim of this project is to create a fundamental rulebook for communicators in the games industry, by analyzing recent cases of PR impacting the performance/reception of these games. The problem being tackled is the evident lack of PR understanding within the games industry, due to the fact that after decades of its existence, even multi-million dollar titles can still manage to perform extremely poorly, regardless of the actual quality of the title. This issue can impact studios (leading to investor losses, lay-offs, and jobs lost in an already dire market), or even solo developers who may be banking on their passion project to help pay their bills.

Utilizing multiple cases of different titles from the same year (to ensure consistent market trends), and a semantic analysis of articles from various sources to get an approximation of the “reception”, the project provides a clear cut comparison of each title’s performance that can easily be assessed using a brief campaign analysis to understand/pinpoint the cause of each reception.

Through this analysis, several key notes can be found that communications specialists in the sector can utilize to not only avoid failures, but also to potentially boost reception beyond the expected numbers. Some effective tactics this project has been able to identify include (but are not limited to) specialized group focuses with the intent of simulating organic discourse, and live-service long term commitment considerations/demonstrations.

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