Metagame 002: How to do Comms in the Era of Brainrot

"mi mi mi"

Yoooooo! Welcome to issue 002 of Metagame.

First! A huge thank you to everyone for supporting this stupid newsletter experiment. We hit over 100 subscribers this week, which honestly, I don't even know good looks like. I could be sharing something terrible lol. But since you all had to verify your subscription AFTER subscribing, I know you're at least willing to click a couple buttons to get it.

What to expect in this issue:

• PUBG Ghosts Vietnam
  • A game publisher literally abandons their players with no explanation
• How to Do Comms in the Era of Brainrot
  • It's actually really fucking easy; be honest and don't expect anything from them
• Oops, XBOX's Month of Good PR Comes to an End
  • XBOX laid off 268 people but instead chose to say "people are pre-ordering GTA!"
• The Community Thinks Marvel Rivals Loves Racism and Sexy Swimsuits
  • And are they wrong?
• Pirates Save Control Resonant
  • How pirates came together to actually ENCOURAGE people to buy the game and support Remedy

1. PUBG Ghosts Vietnam

First, I wanted to give a huge thank you to a reader in Korea who tipped me off to this story. It caused me to look into it and holy shit - things are wild right now with KRAFTON (why the fuck does every company now stylize in caps). It's actually a wild situation to come into with no context, and why try to explain it to you when EsportsT does the best job of anyone I've seen:

To say it in the dumbest way possible, because of EXTREMELY ill-handled esports drama, PUBG is pulling out of Vietnam ENTIRELY. And what's wild is, they haven't said anything. They just literally were like yo - we're out.

Vietnamese press reports that PUBG has removed Vietnamese from the game itself and deleted their Vietnamese social media pages and broadcast channels. This, after banning two Vietnamese players for life.

This response to PUBG on Twitter kinda tells you the overall vibe right now:

We can break down the crazy terrible response. The way they went about it. But what I'm DYING to know is what is going on at KRAFTON. What do they know that we don't? On so many levels, this decision makes no sense.

Abandoning an insanely engaged market that loves (er, loved) your game. A game that was able to deal with the mounting pressure from Delta Force (which, as someone else pointed out - it's literally Delta Force's anniversary and PUBG has basically just offered them the whole market). It literally makes no fucking business sense. I also know for a fact from having seen it myself, that while the overall spend per player of a Vietnamese player is lower than other markets, they still spend a lot of money in games and monetize.

To Korean players, it also doesn't make any sense. There's a Korean proverb about fixing the barn after the cow is gone (too little, too late) - and players in Korea are taking that saying and running with it: "소랑 집 가족 전부 잃고 외양간 고치기 ㅋㅋㅋㅋ" or "lost the cow, the house, and the whole family, then fixed the barn" - which honestly, is really fucking funny.

You'd think the coverage in Korean would be more positive, but like I said, even they are baffled: " 배그는 1억 인구 시장을 포기한 멍청이다!" or "PUBG is an idiot that gave up a 100 million person market" - which - that's what I'm saying! It makes no sense!

The only thing that could possibly be a factor is that currently, KRAFTON doesn't formally have a license to publish the game in Vietnam. They've been working around it. And so perhaps, there's some other behind the scenes stuff going on where KRAFTON decided the risk and possible future cost wasn't worth it.

KRAFTON is pretending like nothing at all is going on, which I don't blame them. If you're looking for the coverage in English, you're not going to find a ton of people talking about it. As a guy that used to run a global publishing operation, you see this a lot. Unless something's happening in English or a Western market, coverage is low - even when the scale of it is truly insane.

You could have no better reflection of game publishers vs. reality than the following two screenshots. The first is PUBG's last post on Twitter, having said nothing about what's going on in Vietnam. And the second is Steam's review histogram that shows you the outpouring of rage from players.

Yikes.

2. How to Do Comms in the Era of Brainrot

I was listening to a recent episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out where they were discussing a NYT thinkpiece about Gen Z and brainrot and it got me thinking about how to do comms in this current era.

The discourse is really interesting to me: Gen Z grew up with the internet. They've never not been online. That also means, they've never not been sold to. Treated like a piece of data. A tracking pixel that carries their preferences from site to site so they can be sold something. The internet is nothing but value exchange and honestly - getting extracted for value. There's no sincerity left on the internet. Everything is over-polished, -tested, -optimized so that it can reach as many people as possible, again, with the hope of selling you something.

If that's what the internet is to you. What's the fucking point man. Enter brainrot.

And honestly, this really helped me out a lot. Because I thought brainrot was just another content cultural trend. But if you think about it from this lens, it makes sense. Everything is Ballerina Cappuccina because nothing matters. Watching brainrot is at least honest. It wants nothing from you. It's so stupid that it can't be monetized. It just is. (until it turns into a Roblox game)

I think this is so powerful because the lesson I've seen so many marketers and comms people take away from this trend is to make your content more brainrot-y. Add that fucking Subway Surfers clip. Embrace the rot. But it's missing the point.

First, it always feels gross when a company does it. Because that's the whole fucking thing brainrot is trying to escape from. The constant commercialization of content and attention.

Gen Z, and everyone else consuming content online, isn't looking for more brainrot social content from a studio. They're just looking for honesty. Something corporations suck at, because rooms that thrive on consensus will never get to honest comms because that room can barely be honest with each other. And so you get PR spun statements. Straight up lies. Or silence.

Often times, honesty comes when you're backed into the corner. Check all the Bungie comms from this week about Destiny and Marathon - and this comment from the recent Marathon video.

And don't get me wrong. This video is still fucking produced and polished to hell and back. BUT THAT'S HOW HUNGRY WE ARE FOR HONESTY. That we'll take anything that FEELS like a sliver of real truth. That's how fucking starved for it we are.

And so how do you actually, truly, reach a generation that is watching a dog drink cappuccino out of a woman's head? There's not some secret ten steps or plan to get there. It's one really simple fucking thing:

DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO BE TRULY, FUCKING HONEST.

Does your comms need polish? Think about that the next time before you polish it. And ask yourself why or who is asking you to do it.

3. Oops. XBOX's Good Month of PR Comes to an End

XBOX (again with the fucking caps people) laid off 268 more people this week. Satya Nadella said it was "great to see" - which is L O fucking L levels of comms insanity.

And XBOX still hasn't said anything about it. What are you supposed to say after coming out of a story like this? There's for sure no good statement you can make, you gotta let the product speak for itself at that point.

What's telling though, and part of the stumble this week, is that the only official statement from XBOX was not about the organizational changes, but Matthew Ball correcting the Verge to say:

So, look. I get wanting to correct someone saying that pre-orders for GTA are leaning more PS5 than XBOX, but on a week when the company is already getting bad press, this is the thing you wanna make a statement on? And even if you're going to do it... setting yourself up to be dunked on in this way is not great:

Which is a pretty good dunk to Ball's statement. Ball literally just says, "hey! Sales for this multiplatform match our share of the market", which like... yeah. I hope so man. How fucked is XBOX if that WASN'T true. That's like fucking baseline my dude. If it was well exceeding XBOX's share of the market, now that's a great story! And again, this is the shit you wanna quibble about when you announced layoffs at the studio that week?

Instead, because of the GTA pre-orders dick measuring contest and no additional comms to players since the official PR article, what you're left with is the statements of all the folks affected by the layoffs that end up speaking louder in this situation. A couple below (of which the press has made a meal out of headlines wise).

So, in short. XBOX cut 268 jobs. Halo's next game is being made by Activision, the Call of Duty company, with a new team. Ninja Theory (Hellblade) is being consulted about closing. Undead Labs (State of Decay) got spun out and then cut staff. World's Edge (Age of Empires) now sits under Activision and lost about half its people and a game. Obsidian moves under Bethesda. Playground and Turn 10 (Forza) merge.

And XBOX wants you to know that pre-orders for GTA match their share of the market. The baseline expectations.

4. The Community Thinks Marvel Rivals Loves Racism and Sexy Swimsuits

Another wild set of decisions that don't make a ton of sense to me, but it tells me there's something else going on internally we don't know.

Season 10 of Marvel Rivals removed "hate speech" as a reporting tag for voice and text chat. And things escalated when some players started getting called racist slurs in game with no way to report it, causing creators and players to start walking away from the game.

And then, instead of responding to any of the controversy, Rivals is instead shipping new skins and wants you to remember to get those sexy swimsuit skins before they leave the store.

And again, when you don't make a statement or make a comment, you let your actions speak for you instead. So what you don't want to do is probably get accused of using AI art twice in the same week and shipping an Emma Frost Spray that TheGamer describes as "a Pharaoh with two shirtless Black men tending to her." Which again, terrible timing tbh, even if it was an accident (which we wouldn't know, because there's been no comms).

Sometimes, things that stack like this are enough to push a community to the edge and try something else. We talked about the power of honest comms above. As the Bungie team hit a home run on its Destiny comms, it got Rivals players to finally switch back over. Oh and Steam reviews went under 50% over the last couple of days, with reviews like: "It's racist there's no report option for racism" or "removes hate speech report option - tonedeaf balance team common netease L".

Now, when you experience racism in Rivals, your reporting goes into the same bucket and penalty ladder as "gg fucking ez".

5. Pirates Save Control Resonant

The best marketing strategy Remedy got launching Control Resonant was free. And honestly, it's a good lesson to marketing teams. You can do all the sponsored streams with Markiplier you want, but sometimes the best marketing that can happen to your game comes from the community.

You might be wondering: why are pirates paying for this game instead of downloading it? It all started when a day before launch, a bootleg version of Control Resonant showed up on Reddit, and instead of spreading like wildfire, the community came up in arms to support Remedy.

I think publishers forget how fucking literate players are now in the business of games and what's going on with studios. This is also a situation of, you reap what you sow, in a good way. The goodwill you put out into the universe comes back to you in dividends over time. And the press coverage and impressions that come out of it is way more than any ad budget (or Markiplier stream) could buy.

What's funny is, Remedy is doing nothing to take advantage of this incredible goodwill and momentum. Which is insane to me when the internet is printing headlines like this for you for free:

Instead, the studio is choosing not to even mention the pirates, let alone thank them - thanking their partnership with Critical Role instead. It's kind of wild to me because 1) it's already the most organic story with legs around your launch, and you wanna boost the conversation where you can - where else are you going to get the sentiment that the game is good, pirates are paying for it - hello!?, and 2) you don't fuck around with the goodwill of pirates lol.

The real question though: does this actually show up in real sales? It's hard to say. On Steam more than 38k people were playing it on Saturday with 88% positive reviews. People are claiming it's Remedy's biggest Steam launch, against about 9,100 peak for the original Control. Gamalytic's estimate after two days: about 237k copies on Steam, about $12.3M in revenue, with 1.4M wishlists.

These are Steam only numbers against an estimated 3 to 4 million copies to break-even across all platforms. So let's not take it as a perfect feel good story quite yet.

That's all for this week!

I've been really loving all your comments and thoughts. It's helped me a lot in refining issue 002, so keep 'em coming! And huge shoutout to Brandon Meier for leaving a real life, human comment on issue 001 itself. Now that's support.

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See you next Sunday.