Mr. Will Powers, known best as the winner of the first season of The Tester show on The PlayStation Network, was until recently a PR generalist at Sony Computer Entertainment America. He is now unemployed, because Sony had layoffs in their PR department recently. After Powers lost his job, he said all of the following on Twitter (note that these tweets have since been removed, of course):
“You have to wonder what the hell PlayStation was thinking laying off more than half of their software PR team going into the holiday season.”
“In typical fashion they're sending titles out to die, because they have no PR support — LBPK, Sports Champions 2, Wonderbook.”
“Worst part it, the PR department was already under-staffed. I feel sorry for those that remain there, because their workload just doubled.”
“PR is non-revenue generating, but has a very low operating cost in relative terms to their results. Laying off to cut costs makes no sense.”
“Already, they outsourced entirely too much work to overpriced agencies, so laying off is only going to exacerbate an existing problem.”
“The point of having external agencies is so that you can scale back without layoffs, not layoff so you can ramp-up.”
“Internal PR teams have product loyalty and only serve one master. Neither can be said about agencies, although there are some select people.”
“That being said, you have to question the priorities of the company as a whole – What the point of AdHoc multiplayer when no one has a Vita?”
“Sony in general is serving too many masters. Each company should operate autonomously. PlayStation shouldn't suffer b/c TVs are overpriced.”
“This is all being said, because I genuinely like and care about the PS product, but they're being hamstrung from success internally.”
***
Now, I wanna talk about PR people, with whom I must deal all the time, since I work as a freelance game journalist. Here's a fact: there are a lot of people like me out there vying for the time and attention of video game PR people working for the major publishers. This world is strange, because instead of the PR people having to pursue us journalists, we have to pursue them.
And it can be hard to get their attention if you don't work for a big name company like IGN or GameSpot, because they don't know if devoting time to independents like myself, who don't necessarily know where their next story is going to be published, is worthwhile to the bottom line. We all want to cover their stuff, but they don't really need all of us to sell their stuff to the masses.
I can't really blame them for taking that perspective. It is a business, after all. They have to do what's best for them.
Given the fact that it is sometimes very difficult to do original coverage of the products of the big publishers, I can't help but feel as if Sony cutting PR staff will be a bad thing for the little guys like me. It's only going to make it harder for them to respond to my emails and phone calls, because they'll have to prioritize the big sites even more than they already have.
As for going with external agencies instead of in-house people, I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Yes, it may be more expensive for them than using their own talent — I don't know anything about that — but I do know that some of my best PR contacts work for agencies. I haven't found that those folks are any less capable of selling the products than in-house people.
If I had to guess why Sony is laying PR people off, it's because they simply don't have much to sell in the near future. Sony, much more than Microsoft, appears to be gearing down for the end of the console generation. For evidence of this, just look at their upcoming first-party lineup for the rest of this year and next year and compare it to what they put out last year.
Powers, like most people who have just lost their jobs, is probably pretty mad and/or sad right now. I don't know if he's lost perspective, so I won't say that he has. He could be accurately describing the situation at SCEA right now for all I know. But I don't think, even if he is being perfectly honest, that this is a disaster for them. It may make my life a little more difficult, however.
