Thursday, June 26, 2008
We Threw a Class Action Lawsuit, But Nobody Came!
Remember the Hot Coffee case? The big scandal that rocked the games biz? The one that causes the latest uproar that has given politicians and madmen ammunition to snipe at the games industry for years? The New York Times reports that the settlement has been reached for all of the meager 2,676 people (out of millions who bought the game) who joined the class action lawsuit. The total defense fees, including settlement but not including charitable contributions (which the company may have been planning on making anyway), amounted to around $30,000.
That makes it a lot harder for the lawyers to recoup the $1.3 million in expenses they are claiming, doesn't it?
My take on this? Okay, Hot Coffee was a major screw-up, no question about it. And I really have to question the maturity and taste of the people involved in it who actually implemented it and ... until a point ... thought it was a good idea.
But I think this case indicates that for the game's intended audience, it was largely a non-issue. The people who were really freaked out over it were non-gamers who neither played it nor bought it for someone in their family to play. And it seems like a sizeable subset of the people in the class-action thought that the graphic violence that was part of the core gameplay was okay for their underage little darlings... they just objected to the possibility that said angel could log into the Internet, bypass all the porn that's there, and instead download and install a patch that would enable them to see non-anatomically correct sex.
To be honest, I'd have expected a lot more people to have participated in the class action lawsuit, too. But really, the issue itself isn't really over leaving content in that would change the rating from M to AO (I mean, that's a difference of ONE YEAR... meaning 17-year-olds couldn't buy it for themselves). It's really about people - parents and family, mainly - not understanding or caring what the ratings mean, and thus making uninformed decisions, in spite of the best efforts of the ESRB and retailers to make this clear. And I think that's really only something that will be resolved with time and persistence.
Hat Tip to Game Politics for the scoop.
Labels: Politics
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:05 AM (Permalink)
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I'm not sure you can really say Hot Coffee was a screwup -- at least not on the part of the developers.
After all, it requires a mod/hack to activate -- it's hard to claim that this is the developers' fault without opening similar arguments for third-party nude texture patches or for total conversion mods.
The only screwup here is on the part of the people who thought the developer was to blame.
After all, it requires a mod/hack to activate -- it's hard to claim that this is the developers' fault without opening similar arguments for third-party nude texture patches or for total conversion mods.
The only screwup here is on the part of the people who thought the developer was to blame.
The hack just enabled some content that had never been removed. So it wasn't like a full fan-made mode... it was just a toggle to activate some content that had been disabled in the release. They later found they could use the same memory value changes on the console version to get the "mod" on the consoles as well.
Yes, the difference between M and AO is a year, but stores don't see it that way. If you release an AO-rated title, most stores aren't going to sell your game.
When this "scandal" first started unfolding, most stores flat-out pulled GTA:SA off the market. The only I can remember that actually sold the AO game is GameStop/EB, just for the sake of getting rid of their old inventory.
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When this "scandal" first started unfolding, most stores flat-out pulled GTA:SA off the market. The only I can remember that actually sold the AO game is GameStop/EB, just for the sake of getting rid of their old inventory.
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