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Take Two Shareholders to sue over Hot Coffee
casualsax3 writes "Take Two, the publisher of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, is facing more legal action over the game. Separately, two law firms have filed class-action lawsuits on behalf of shareholders who they say lost money due to the controversy about the game. This comes right on the heels of news that the
Sex Workers Outreach Program is
calling for a boycott of the game."
The shareholders should get together with the Sex Workers Outreach Program and get some relaxation time in!
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
The share holders are in dire need of the sex workers union. Anyone who is going to use this as an excuse to sue is fucking crazy. Hot Coffee didn't make them lose money. It publicised the game to a lot more people than ever before. I know people who paid for a copy to just see that extra bit.
Americans are so fucking mad
I drink to make other people interesting!
It's really clearly starting to look to me like the biggest mistake Take Two made with the hot coffee incident was admitting fault. If they'd just stood up and said "screw you, the content isn't in the game unless you mod it, and even after you mod it it's less extreme than content that already exists in other M games", fought the opportunistic politicians trying to exploit them, and fought the ESRB AO rating, they'd have come out of this much better. They'd have made a lot of enemies but at least they'd have managed to get some damage control out of it and at least that's something, the response they ultimately chose had no positive side effects at all.
Some stores, that already were weary about carrying GTA titles, pulled GTA from their shelves.
You can't sell games if no one can buy them.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Didn't he buy stock in Take Two? Im sure his name is right on the top of both suits.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
GET OVER IT.
With or without the help of a sex worker.
I'm not fond of gratitous sex and killing in video games. If you have to have it, fine, but the game should have some sort of warning on the front. Maybe "M" for mature? This code would prevent minors from buying the game, similar to "R" rated movies that contain sex/killing/raping/cussing.
Wait, they already have this "M" label?
Where is the problem? Either "M" games are getting rated "T", which is not the case here, or Wal-Mart, EB Games, etc are not enforcing the rating when they sell. Hardly a TakeTwo problem...
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
So you sue a company, bring up more press about it and cost them money on lawyers... because they lost you money?
This is going to cost them even more money. The other share holders should sue them for this.
I like muppets.
HEY it's LOSE
yes LOSE
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Grand Theft Auto has made millions for these people. You don't get points for beating up prostitutes any more than you get points for beating up anybody else, in the form of cash dropped. The missions (which never seem to involve killing hookers) reward much more richly. The game encourages the forming of relationships, and protecting girls, for which, again, you will get many more rewards. So please explain why this game, above others, in it's unmodded retail form, upsets prostitutes and shareholders?
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What happened to 'the value of shares may go down as well as up', or didn't they read the small print? Boo hoo. The stock market is basically upmarket gambling. They gambled, and they lost. Cry me a river.
You must think in Russian.
Who ever heard of this anyway? Suing a company because their coffee is too hot? Coffee is supposed to be hot.
Yeah, but Jackie says the top was faulty
ref: seinfeld.
I.O.U One Sig.
Dear Shareholders:
You purchased stock in Company A. Company A made decision X and decision Y. Decision Y caused them to loose money. The law does not entitle you to sue company A for not making you rich. It's the inherent risk of owning stock.
In other news, I'm filing suit against the Texas State Lottery for picking the wrong numbers in last weeks drawing. I paid good money for my lottery ticket, and I have a right not to loose that money because of other people's failure to do exactly what I want.
Lawyers screw people for money.
Prostitutes screw people for money.
If this keeps up, Take-Two is going to be sued by politicians next.
This is just like the McDonald's lawsuit. Sued over hot coffee. So what's the story this time, the Take Two shareholders are whining because the coffee served at the shareholder's meeting is too hot?
Wait, they already have this "M" label? Where is the problem?
There's a big difference between a very mild M (e.g. Forsaken 64, which had no sex, no dialogue to speak of, and no more violence than T-rated Goldeneye 007) and an extreme M (the cleaned up version of GTA: San Andreas). Trouble is that the explanation of this difference is hid on the back of the box, which is behind glass.
Land of the "Free" and the home of the people who expect everything to be handed to them!
Maybe they meant Sony is loose with its money which will causes them to lose money ;)
Dean G.
McDonald's got sued over Hot Coffee too, and we all know how that went!
Rockstar's games are all about pushing the boundaries of sex and violence. Hot coffee was an example where they tried something, and pulled back. It was an experiment that didn't work. An experiment that had unintended, unexpected side-effects.
Investors basically rake in money hand over fist when it works out for Rockstar, and lose money when it doesn't. This was one of the latter times.
I really don't care where it came from, the fact that you had to modify the software yourself to get it to do this means that they had taken it out. This is only slightly more of an issue than nude raider patches or naked sims.
The ______ Agenda
Simple as that , at least this is not as bad as the Satanic Ritual Abuse cases , or the Day-care child abuse scare( Several innocent people spent a long time in jail) .
Going by Idiotic mass hysteria , this one is rather weak .
I don't think I would be wrong in thinking that a few stories about A witch , in the Sun newspaper and Fox news .
would have a rash of people being burnt at the stake across the world, for consorting with the devil.
Some people think the blood of babies is used in Passover bread , still to this day, So a good old witch burning does not seem too OTT
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
It's too bad the box isn't taken out of the glass case before purchasing OH WAI-
Suggested use case: Pick up one game, look at the back, put the game back on the shelf, and repeat until you have found a suitable game. The problem with this use case is that in Wal-Mart, the parent can't take several games out of the glass case one at a time to check the back of each one without hogging a CSM's time and potentially creating a perception of being impolite and/or a "demon customer".
It's like gamblers sueing a casino.
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And then Rockstar comes along. They want to have their cake and eat it too. For attention-whoring reasons, they want to include the controversial "Hot coffee" scene, but they don't have the guts to slap an "AO" rating on their title and take a battle to distribution channels. No, they want to be the bad boys but still suck on Wal*mart's moneyteet. So they pulled their cute little trick. Slashdotters tend to gravitate towards the obvious, high-visibility assholes like Jack Thompson. You'd rather not consider that there is a real mess here that could have been avoided if one company hadn't been such a greedy attention whore.
A self-regulated rating system is a fine thing to have around. As a side effect of their antics, Rock Star/Take Two have assembled the proof that it doesn't work, playing right into the hands of uptight legislators and holy rollers. The most telling sign of trouble is that the ESRB can't seem to do anything substantial to Take Two, i.e. fining or sueing them for breaking their agreement. Is it because the original rules for content review were lax? I don't think so. It's more likely that ESRB doesn't have the will to get into a serious dispute with an industry-dominant publisher.
Have always wondered this: Why was so much fuss kicked up about a scene in modded GTA (currently AO on amazon), that was present in the retail version of Farenheit (currently M on amazon)? I believe there are two _possible_ sex scenes in Farenheit that you kinda control - I've played one of them.
Was it just not popular enough to get sued over?
When Take Two is in the news game sales go up so if they sue game sales go up and they make more money!