Ah Pook wrote on Jun 4
th, 2015 at 12:31am:
Do you think having some hottie doing the Twitch every week instead of tons o'fun would actually bring in that many more people?
Simple fact is that effective spokespeople who are going to successfully promote and and entertain need to be attractive or charismatic (preferably both), or at the very least they need to be presentable and likable.
As a rule gamers and coders don't need to be, but anyone who is going to be in the public eye has to make a effort.
Fat Jerry was originally brought in to moderate and run the community interface, his emergence as a public figure was never planned or managed. His experience in small market radio and as a fan make him suitable for pod-casts, and a possible bridge between Turbine and the fans. Yet even before he started showing up in videos that capacity to "connect" was all but gone in the wake of his moderation behavior, and how he allowed himself to be perceived.
Like the larger population Jerry is not a aesthetically pleasing presence on video, at the risk of being cruel I will even go farther and say that Jerry's physical appearance and mannerisms in unguarded moments in recordings is a touch repulsive.
The world is not fair, attractive and charismatic people make better PR, and community relations personnel. It doesn't have to be a smoking hot young woman or even a woman at all, any male presenter that made a effort to represent Turbine in a professional way and convey a likable air would be a improvement over the current situation, Jerry Snook hurts Turbines bottom line.
And it goes beyond Jerry's physical appearance and mannerism issues, all his moderation mistakes, inadvertent insults, heavy handed tactics, blatant lies, failure to understand the game basics and legendary inconsistency of application make it impossible for people to separate Jerry from his moderation when he attempts to do PR.
The ideal situation for Turbine would be to have a competent community manager who is very knowledgeable about the game (or appears to be) that is a voice only heard in Text and known by their moderation and sense of humor rather than their face or voice.
Working in concert with that community manager would be a game-face, a active personality for the game who is attractive or charismatic and able to covey a sense of being a player or fan. Yes this is all rather calculated, but it has worked for a lot of games and it makes it easy for players to have a proxy investment in that face. For the Company, the face is a excellent buffer, the face-type provides updates, promotion, and entertainment. At the same time no one ever expects them to have on the spot answers to the type of tough questions that torpedo Fat Jerry and Sev_Pay on a regular basis because they "should know". Tough question? "oh wow! I don't know, I guess we will have to ask the team about that and let people know in next weeks twitch-stream.... yada yada yada... "
This isn't rocket science, games and cable channels, youtube channels have been running these types of personalities with great success for years to promote games, films, comics. G4 practically made it gospel for quite a while.
And talking heads that don't repulse? they come cheap, very cheap, bright-young things both male and female who need experience, exposure, and references are churned out by university media studies, and broadcasting programs, year after year. A smart company will keep a steady turn-over and year or two to maximize the effectiveness of that type of spokesperson.