Duke Nukem nukes PR

It would appear that Duke Nukems PR threatened to nuke people who said nasty things about the new release and was then nuked itself! Ars Tech:

...the Redner Group's official Twitter account posted something you almost never see: an open threat stating that outlets who reviewed Duke Nukem Forever poorly may not receive review copies of games in the future. Anyone who has done this job for any amount of time has suffered through a dry spell after giving a publisher a bad review, but this is the first time the threat of a blacklist has been made public.

"Too many went too far with their reviews...we are reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn't based on today's venom," the company tweeted. "Bad scores are fine. Venom filled reviews...that's completely different," another tweet read. Currently, Duke Nukem Forever has a Metacritic score of 49 on the Xbox 360, the format most commonly sent to the press. For a game with such a large marketing budget and name recognition, that's shockingly low.

The furore spread out all over the social media nets in a viral way that any PR would have been proud of, sadly in this case Duke didn't take to the Wildean view that any publicity is good publicity and thus nuked the PR Agency:

2K Games has officially weighed in on the issue. "2K Games does not endorse the comments made by Jim Redner and we can confirm that The Redner Group no longer represents our products. We have always maintained a mutually-respectful working relationship with the press and do not condone his actions in any way."

Face saving nuking move, may even have got the correct PR bang, and maybe even without paying the bucks. We eagerly now await the discovery at Redner that it was an Intern wot done it

Reinforces my view that you should never buy anything until after it hits the market, time passes, and the independent reviewers can get a good look at it.