Branding is an important part in business. In short, it maintains a company’s reputation. Many of us who regularly eat fast food will drink Coca-Cola, for example, because since its introduction in 1886, it has been a consistently good, well-known, and refreshing source of beverage to this day, 1985’s New Coke notwithstanding. “Coke” itself has become a genericized trademark.
Online social media platforms, including but not limited to Facebook, are the newest, the most transparent, and perhaps the most convenient way of discussing a company or its brand. While products such as Coca-Cola are marketed towards a general consumer base, the most scrutiny from the online social network community may instead be on hobbies that computer geeks and other Internet dwellers like the most—video games.
When discontent, the video gaming community has been one of the most vocal critics of just about anything. One controversy in the past few months was the introduction of the Xbox One, a video game system serving as the successor to the Xbox 360. The Xbox One was to include restrictive features not present in the Xbox 360, such as needing to connect to the Internet every 24 hours via the Xbox One for verification and blocking pre-owned games without paying an additional fee. A great amount of backlash from the community ensued [1], pressuring Microsoft, the developer of the Xbox One, to remove the Xbox One’s restrictive policies before the console was even released [2].
Another point of controversy was for a video game itself. Mass Effect 3 is a science fiction action video game developed by Bioware and released March 2012. The subject of the controversy itself was trivial; the ending of Mass Effect 3 was thought to be poorly written. Despite the fact that anticlimactic endings are common in some works of fiction, the controversy was once again widespread in the community [3], with a Facebook page even dedicated to petitioning for a new ending to the game [4]. The response eventually pressured Bioware to release a recut ending for free the following summer, a rare occurrence for video games [5].
This vocality, however, may very well be a blessing in disguise. If Microsoft had not, for instance, rescinded its restrictions on the Xbox One, then many people who would have bought the Xbox One when it would come out would have been surprised by the Xbox One’s user unfriendliness and complained after it would have been too late for Microsoft to change the Xbox One at all. Furthermore, the same community that criticizes its industry can also come to its defence. News reports can at times be inaccurate, with those on video games being no exception. Preceding Mass Effect 3, the original Mass Effect was criticized by feminist author Cooper Lawrence on Fox News for its sexual content, exaggerating the actual amount of explicitness in Mass Effect. In response, a large amount of negative reviews flooded the Amazon page for Lawrence’s then-latest book, The Cult of Perfection [6].
While the general audience for various products is not quite as fanatical as video game audiences, the lesson from these incidents is still relevant to other companies who open up themselves on the social network.
