If the NFTs are a scam BHVR NEEDS to say something before someone spends money on it

yeah it weird they didnt say sometging alrady, others companis even if they have free weekends just do some sort of control if ish going down

Masters in Communications here, with a concentration in professional communications here:

The fact they aren't saying something is a really bad sign. Yes, even though it is a holiday weekend. De-confirming something like this could be done in a twitter post, it wouldn't require a top level choice, this is what you would be paying your day to day content/social media manager to handle and they would need to be in the know of if there were any major brand deals lined up. Content Managers are 'on call' on holidays in the sense they should be checking in every so often to ensure they don't need to put out a fire like this. So the fact they aren't de-confirming it is troubling, because if it isn't true the choice to say 'We aren't doing this' to something generating a ton of negative buzz in your community should take 5 seconds to make.

It either points to serious dysfunction in their leadership structure, where they can't even do the basic "we are not doing this and it goes against our values" post to judo flip this PR snafu into a way to build positive brand perception, or it being real so they CAN'T deconfirm it and either they aren't allowed to say 'yeah we are doing it' due to responsibilities to their partners, or because they are trying to backpedal because they realized their fans are not about making computers do sudoku so hard it makes the planet uninhabitable in 10 years so they can create artificial scarcity of basic gameplay functions.

Lets start from the bottom and work our way up.

PR doesn't take weekends off for the same reason hospitals staff up extra on the weekend: It is the time ######### is most likely to go down. If no one on the social media team is about during their prime time where things are most likely to develop, that is a sign of mismanagement.

Banking fraud is a huge thing and banks spend a ton of money on marketing and PR to combat it because it costs them a lot of money. Like it is a huge thing, you don't just trust people to 'see through scams.' Any time you log into your account you see a message telling you not to ever give anyone your password, for example.

Again, a huge thing that companies spend a lot of effort to combat. This VERY SITE has automated systems in place to prevent you from claiming to be BHVR and making it clear who is and isn't representing the company because even a few people believing it can rapidly mutate out.

This is the most hillarious 'Armchair PR expert' take I have seen all year. It basically is saying the entire concept of PR is fake. No, sorry, message control is a thing and you in fact should not trust your customers to 'figure things out.' Even if they do it creates analysis fatigue that makes them just not want to engage with you, and the reality is in most situations it remains this negative point of controversy and anticipation that causes rumors to start in an an information vaccum because you couldn't be assed to say 'We aren't doing NFTs' on twitter.

Don't get me wrong, I also suspect its fake, but everything you described is pretty much the opposite of best practices, and in many cases (ex: Banking scam emails) it is literally not true.

People deliberately misinforming your consumer base to the point it is front page news on all sites associated with your brand for 24 hours and is starting to pick up play on serious news sites isn't a 'Oh whatever' situation. Yes, it is likely not true but it is still really bad buzz that creates negative brand perception. If I may get especially esoteric and into the weeks of the field of PR, even if people don't believe it in the end, the fact they could believe it creates a mental association with your brand you want to avoid because it causes negative emotional responses in people when they evoke your product mentally. Or, in layman's terms: People are more likely to be less happy when they think about DBD in the future without knowing why, even if they don't believe it in the end, because the human brain is weird. And this is assuming most people won't believe it, which is a BIG gamble when the cost is as simple as tweeting 'lol no.'

Saying 'BHVR is reasonable doing nothing here" is the equivalent of saying it is reasonable to hear a doctor say 'Well it is a moderately deep cut but it only has a 10% chance of infection and you won't bleed out, so lets not waste the time or effort to disinfect it and bandage it up." Or to for a hospital to have no doctors because its the weekend and no one ever gets hurt on the weekend.

Suffice to say, no, it is not normal for a company of 600 to say nothing in this situation, even on the weekend. It likely won't bring BHVR down (But, lets be very clear, BHVR is in a precarious situation, if you follow DBD news, the community, and its competitors and it would actually not surprise be if DBD falls apart over something like an NFT scandal) but it isn't something you want looming in your past adding fuel to a fire. Because...

When your community is rooting for your brand to fail, you have already lost. The very fact this is definitely an element of why this rumor spread so much is significant, and is part of why I said that BHVR has a long history of being very bad at PR. The situation has devolved to the point where even if this wasn't true people indeed would push it as true, and to get out of that hole requires consistent excellence in PR.

If BHVR had good PR practices, this rumor would never have been relevant, but they don't, so now they have to treat every smear and scandal as a threat, because their current priority is (or should be) repairing their reputation.

Mods would, in most org structures, not be in the know enough to confirm or deny this, nor would they have the ability to say yes/no.

This would fall to someone like a social media/marketing/PR, coordinator, manager, specialist, ect. Someone trusted to basically write official communications for BHVR and to know about major partnerships because they helped plan press releases and media assets for them, which isn't that high up mind but isn't "The CEO needs to take this phonecall as their kids cry about their Disneyland Vacation being ruined" tier.

Gotta also say, feel real bad for them and other 'Customer Service' tier communicators in situations like this, because when there is ambiguous communication that is causing anxiety in the community, it gets dumped on their lap both in terms of the work that needs to be done, and often times in perception of the community, because they are the most readily accessible identifiable individuals. I have worked with groups that have basically grinded away at moderator tier employees making them bear the brunt of radio silence in crisis situations and it was not pleasant. So goodspeed to all of them, hopefully people realize they are not part of PR or Marketing decisions.

They're actually (I can bold things too) saying the NFT Chatterer is exclusive, which is a blatantly true claim. I can't explain this any more simply, if you just want to wave a pitchfork and don't want to understand there's nothing more to be said.

Tell me you've never worked in PR without telling me you've never worked for PR