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Atari Tries To Supress Bad Reviews, Claims Piracy
im_thatoneguy sends in an account up at Shacknews about Atari's actions to get early reviews of its upcoming game Alone In the Dark pulled from Web sites in Europe. Atari sued the German site 4Players, alleging piracy, and also cancelled an advertising deal on the site, after a pre-release review gave the game only 68%. 4Players posted a commentary (translation) alleging that Atari is doing this bcause the review is unfavorable. Shacknews reports that Atari has also demanded that both Gamer.no and GameReactor remove early reviews — both reviews gave the game a score of 3/10. Kotaku editorializes: "[Does Atari] fear that, because these outlets may have received copies of the game 'early' (i.e. from pirated copies), that they're somehow reviewing incomplete code, which could affect their opinion of the game? Maybe. Pessimists could, however, be forgiven for thinking it's a convenient excuse for Atari to attack negative reviews of the only game they're releasing in 2008 that has any chance of making them some money."
... once again. Before I read this I didn't know about "Alone in the Dark". I guess their strategy worked
> but none of the sites mentioned recieved official review copies of Alone In The Dark, which means they're all pirated
You lie.
And your logic is super fail.
Break the LAW how, pray tell?God I love Slashdot's fluid moral code.
The same article that reported the take down request / suit, reported the copy reviewed as a legal distribution copy designed for reviews. I don't see any indication where the site was obviously willing to break the law.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
But seriously if they did manage to get their hands on a boxed version prior to release I don't see how they can scream. It also might be a good test to show their true motives if someone set up a fake review praising the game and pointed out to Atari that they did the same thing. I'd bet Atari wouldn't say a word. Do they really think that this kind of crap is going to help in ANY way? Have they never heard of the Streisand effect? Now the story has been slahdotted and I'm sure it'll spread to most of the tech and gamer sites so instead of being able to sneak their bowel churner past the gate now everyone will know that it sucks. A really stupid move by the legal department at Atari IMHO. If they wanted to get the review changed they should have wined them and dined them and bought a bunch of ads. Instead the just stirred up the hornets nest. But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Since when is buying a retail copy before the street date illegal?
It might be a violation of the agreement between the publisher and retailers, but it has no bearing on the consumer whatsoever.