Sony's Falsified Interview With Neil Druckmann Proves The Need For Games Media

Summary

• Sony retracted the Druckmann interview after admitting to misquoting him and apologised for misrepresenting his statements.
• Sony doesn't need to have journalistic integrity in publishing interviews, it just has to make its developers sound good. It failed at that too, though.
• Without a healthy, functioning games media, you should expect corporations to lie to you and make stuff up all the time since there will be nobody left to challenge them.

Last night, as I was playing Hades 2 in bed, my Twitter timeline exploded. Just days after Sony published an interview with Naughty Dog studio head Neil Druckmann where he was quoted as pushing generative AI and saying the studio’s new game would “redefine mainstream perceptions of gaming”, Sony retracted the entire interview. This came after Druckmann himself very diplomatically said on Twitter that he had been misquoted in the published interview.

In Sony’s follow-up statement, the company said that after re-reviewing the interview, it found “several significant errors and inaccuracies that don’t represent his perspective and values” on topics like “animation, writing, technology, AI, and future projects”. If you read the interview before it was taken down, that covers the entirety of his statements. It also apologised to Druckmann for “misrepresenting his words and for any negative impact this interview might have caused him and his team”.

How Did Sony Get The Druckmann Interview So Wrong?

In the last decade, game companies have gradually limited the amount of interviews the heads of their first-party studios do with the games press. With PlayStation specifically, you’ll notice that games journalists rarely publish first-hand statements from Sony’s star creatives anymore, and that the majority of interviews with these people are published on Sony’s website. As a large corporation, Sony likely wants to put all statements through PR so they can be edited to put forward whatever narrative the company needs. This is, after all, the function of PR.

But PR isn’t beholden to the journalistic values of not misquoting your interviewees and definitely not completely fabricating sentences that they never said. If the statement that Sony fabricated hadn’t enraged so many people across the wider games industry, perhaps this would never have come to light. But because Druckmann faced so much backlash for something he didn’t say, he had to publicly clarify that he had never actually said the things he was being criticised for.

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It’s particularly ironic that Sony’s PR was supposed to make Druckmann, who is already a controversial figure in the industry, look good, but ended up doing the exact opposite – though it probably should have predicted that those statements would be very upsetting in the current climate. Interestingly, you’ll notice that Sony never actually takes responsibility for the massive flub, instead implying that against all odds, a very rare interview with one of the most prominent faces of the PlayStation slate was published with massive inaccuracies in all aspects despite having been reviewed before publication.

What do you mean you “found” errors and inaccuracies? You put them there!

What actually happened? We can only speculate. Maybe Sony, in keeping with its pro-AI stance, popped the interview transcript into ChatGPT and published whatever it spat out. Maybe somebody at the company wilfully manipulated Druckmann’s statements to push generative AI. Maybe an intern just did a really bad job of editing, though I doubt an interview with Neil Druckmann would have been delegated that way. There’s no way of knowing for sure, because Sony likely will keep mum and hope the whole thing gets swept under the rug.

So, What Happens With Sony And Naughty Dog Now?

Well, Sony’s credibility is shot, so there’s that. Druckmann is one of the most prominent faces of the video game industry, and so had the ability to come out publicly to say that his employer had misquoted him. If it had been a less powerful developer, we might never have heard a clarification at all.

This is what happens when interviews are released through PR instead of through the press, but this likely won’t compel corporations to reopen access to journalists – instead, the PR machine will work to become more silent, continuing to use interviews and statements to control the narrative, just without being caught. This is certainly not the first time Sony has done this, and it won’t be the last.

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While this continues, games media continues to get gutted by venture capitalists and executives pursuing exponential profits. Last week, IGN Entertainment acquired Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, GamesIndustry.biz, VG24/7 and Dicebreaker, laying off many talented and experienced journalists in the process while consolidating a number of excellent websites under the IGN umbrella. Just yesterday, Vox Media announced that it is partnering with OpenAI in a move that its union soundly denounced – The Verge, which has a great gaming vertical, is one of the websites affected.

In an industry without journalistic watchdogs and independent media, this is what happens – corporations just make stuff up to suit their needs, and usually, they get away with it. A company doesn’t have to face meaningful accountability to its employees as much as it does to the external press, which is why media consolidation and the constant threat to journalists’ jobs does actually matter to consumers, even if they don’t know it.

But it doesn’t really matter if people recognise the value of games media or not. The fact is that companies like Sony will continue to do this, and there’s really nothing we can do about it but continue to challenge them and cast doubt when we read something that sounds ridiculous. I wonder who the next victim of misquoting will be?

Naughty Dog

Part of PlayStation Studios, Naughty Dog has a long history of creating great games for the platform, from Crash Bandicoot to Jak & Daxter. It is perhaps better known now for the smash hit series The Last Of Us and Uncharted, games that push the boundaries of great storytelling and action-packed set pieces.