You’ve probably seen Arma 3 footage pop up in the news in the last few months. Whether it was news channels or various people online claiming that the footage was in some way real-life footage of the war in Ukraine or if it was the subsequent amount of publications debunking the false claim the Arma team is well aware of the issue and seeking to address it.
PR lead at Bohemia Interactive, Pavel Křižka recently spoke to GamesIndustry.biz to discuss the recent clips popping up online.
We’ve been dealing with these videos for a very long time… They’ve mostly been from Arma 3 and previously from Arma 2. Arma 3 has been heavily used, mostly on social networks, to make videos that look like footage from real-life combat situations. We’ve been dealing with that very often… But nowadays, of course, because of the war in Ukraine, these videos are gaining huge traction. We felt like we needed to react officially to show that we knew about the problem, and that we are dealing with it. We also wanted to educate the general public and even the media, which sometimes take this footage as real as well.
PR Lead at Bohemia Interactive – Pavel Křižka
Křižka noted that “No developer wants their game to be used in such a way.” The results of these videos going viral and being represented by media organizations and on social media falesly pushed Bohemia to reach out to fact-checking organizations and media outlets like AFP and Reuters in an attempt to fight the misinformation.
This way of combating these videos is the best from our point of view… These organizations and media have much better tools and reach to effectively fight with. At least once or twice a week, I’m in touch with such fact-checkers – generally, they just send a video and ask for us to confirm whether it is from Arma 3 or another game. This proves to be quite effective. But we definitely can’t remove every video that is being uploaded. It’s a never-ending process even now.
PR Lead at Bohemia Interactive – Pavel Křižka
All of this has been simultaniously going on while Bohemia is working on both Arma 4 and Arma Reforger. While Arma 4 is “still some years away” but Křižka notes that “basically, everybody in the studio is fighting this,” Křižka continued. “We watch a lot of videos about our game, so whenever someone sees such a video – whether they’re devs or in marketing or whatever – are flagging it down to us. We, of course, have a legal department but they are dealing more with the consequences of this, but there’s no one here that browses the internet all day every day whose job is solely to do such a thing. We are concentrating more on our work in game development.”
