Video Game Public Relations Primer with Dean Takahashi of Venture Beat

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This is a foundational briefing from reporter Dean Takahashi for video game public relations firms.

If you want to specialize in public relations for the video game industry, this exclusive interview will bring you up to speed quickly on media relations best practices in this vertical.

Before Venture Beat, Dean Takahashi was a San Jose Mercury News staff writer covering the semiconductor and video game industries.

He also wrote business stories and game and technology reviews, and I worked with him on articles for several clients over the years.

Takahashi has around 30 years of experience as a journalist covering tech. He has worked at the Wall Street Journal, Red Herring magazine, the San Jose Mercury News in an earlier stint, the Los Angeles Times Orange County Edition, the Orange County Register, and the Dallas Times Herald.

He is the author of “Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution,” a book about making Microsoft’s game console, published in 2002.

Video Game PR Insights

5:19 – Takahashi discusses how he prefers to receive public relations pitches.

6:30 – Takahashi talks about the relationship between the growth of email and the quality and quantity of PR pitches he receives.

7:21 – Takahashi on the amount of pitches he receives each day and how he decides which email pitches to open.

8:37 – Takashi talks about staying on top of news developments in the video game industry.

10:14 – Takahashi on the challenges of covering the video game industry, and covering a new product to be released when the final product is unavailable for review.

12:06 – Takahashi on the marketing and PR machine behind consul games, “When you go to E3…everybody’s trying to compete for attention…[and] you always get the sense from going to that show that the video game industry has not grown up…”

14:47 – Takahashi on the opportunities the online components of game consoles offers public relations practitioners,  “The community involvement that that creates, the fan base…is something that is sort of the future of marketing and something that has to be carefully managed…”

17:27 – Takahashi talks about why PR for console games is handled so differently than PR for PC games.

18:38 – Takahashi talks about Sony’s marketing campaign for PlayStation 3, and Sony’s strategy versus Ninetendo’s and Microsoft’s. 

21:33 – Takahashi discusses the growth of the video game business and offers his opinion on the studios move to take control of games developed on their motion picture properties.

24:07 – Takahashi talks about professional sports leagues making deals with different electronic game publishers, and the impact these deals have on gamers and the video game industry.

26:10 – Takahashi discusses his books “Opening the X-Box” and “The Xbox 360 Uncloaked.”

28:59 – Takahashi offers his predictions for the video game industry moving forward.

Photo by Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us.