BF-Games Blog

It wasn’t an easy job when we started our website in 2002. There were content management systems and there were forums but fans also needed a huge amount of skill to get things done. Create your own template, create a bridge between forum and website, and enable third party tools. Today things are much easier. There is WordPress with its billions of tools and templates and all the “out of the box” packeges for communities, with forums, social media tools, video management systems, and all the other stuff you need to build a community. Today everyone can start a fansite within 48 hours and that scares me.

But that’s not the only thing that has changed during the years. The most important thing is that EA realized how big the scope of community websites is. At its zenith thousands of people gathered at the forums of Planetbattlefield, TotalBF2, Project Reality and other communities worldwide to discuss about Battlefield 2. And around that time EA started to invite the managers of this sites to the studios and grant them access to their games. In 2005 we were able to test Battlefield 2 three month before the release and as far as I remember the EA Community Day in 2006 was the first event in the United States.

As a professional writer I have conflicting thoughts about those kinds of events. If a journalist writes about the car market and attends a press conference of a manufacturer he is not allowed to accept merchandising, gifts, or any other benefits. Most newspapers and magazines have this rule for their people to assure their autonomy. A theory says that journalists who accept gifts and benefits for a company are not longer uncritical and independent because of an inner censorship. You might leave some critical questions about the model out if the company granted you 20 percent discount for your own car, won’t you?

If we look at the community events we have a similar situation. Fan sites are not gaming magazines. Fansites are comparable to the yellow press. They collect every single statement, screenshot, and video to make their own interpretations. This way rants, rumors, and speculations are born and some of them might last forever. People always keep the rumors in mind even if DICE and EA release a dozen statements and clarifications. That’s how things work since nearly ten years now but now something has changed. DICE hired a community manager to zero out rumors and I doub’t it is going to work.

To explain you my concerns we have to take a closer look at the pecking order. First of all there are gaming magazines and some of the online magazines (those with digital distribution platforms) guarantee the revenue. That in mind it is clear that the “A press” gets all the nifty screenshots, videos, and insides before the fan sites. The classical job of a fan site is to collect those shots and videos and aggregate at the own website. And beside that job there have to be speculations about the table of content, possible modifications, options, and all the other stuff people wish to see in a game. Visitors of a fansite demand those kind of news since it distinguishs the fan site from the magazines.

We go deeper, we interpret and reinterpret every sentence a devs says during interviews, and we draw our own conclusions. We take hidden cameras to  a booth and leak the first video of a trailer. We scan blogs, press rooms, and the website of the publisher for hidden renders and once the game is released we take it apart until we found every single piece of information. We are more than fans, we are junkies, and we are addicted to the game. Rumors are our staff of life and the discovery of a leak is our fulfillment. But there is a problem: the people at the marketing bureaus dislike everything we love.

At the beginning this conflict wasn’t a big deal. There is us and there is EA. We found a leak, our users are happy, and EA wouldn’t dare to counteract against the news. Just imagine the headline: “Big bad publisher sues small fansite”. Not the best idea to to strengthen the corporate image and that’s why we had no contact with DICE or EA for a long long time. Things changed with the introduction of the community days. There are still no law suits if something is released that is still under embargo but if you take a closer look at the news you’ll find hints like “removed due request by EA”. And that’s what I meant when I talked about inner censorship earlier.

The mails with the request are not from the legal department but from the people you know from the community events. Here is a (fictional) example: “Hey, would it be a problem to delete those screens and the news. You know, it’s not a big deal but we don’t want to have those screens online at the moment”. And believe me, if you know the person from a community event which was great fun and entertainment it can be really, really hard to say No and let those screens online – especially if you left the event with a shitload of shirts, stickers, and other stuff…. It’s a dangerous liaison that publishers and fan sites contract and fan sites have to watch out that they don’t lose their autonomy.

This might sound harsh but don’t get me wrong: The community days are a great invention. It’s a great opportunity to get in contact with the devs and other enablers. You can manage the conversation of a whole year (online) within a single night and it’s simply awesome to see that the guys who make the games really love what they do. Those events are an enrichment and strengthen the community but you have to keep one thing in mind: As it is clear that some questions remain unanswered and it is not allowed to take pictures at all times even during a community event it must also be clear that those events can not change the way we work – even if the new community manager zh1nth0 is at pains to make clear that “only real info come from EA or DICE”.

I said it before: we are fans, we, are junkies, we are addicted, and this is madness