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."

Comments

Just take it

[kiehlster]

So I guess no one has learned from the wise ways of Penny Arcade's ad campaign.

On another note, if you get a bad review, you should take it. Crying like a baby only emphasizes the ratings. You may get sales from a small fraction of people who play it to verify that it sucks, but sooner or later all the review sites will say the game sucks and it will only make the situation worse. The whole "bad publicity is good publicity" paradigm is long dead in this age of gamers.

When will they learn?

[TibbonZero]

When will these gaming companies (and others) learn that this isn't the 80's anymore. This news spreads like wildfire and makes them look really bad. Its a much better idea to try to promote positive news instead of repressing and pretty obviously trying to force a lack of journalistic integrity.

Better start learning German

[Cathoderoytube]

This is surprising. Maybe I'll have to start learning German if I want to get honest game reviews now. I have a feeling the North American game reviewers will probably be a lot more accommodating to Atari's threats.

I recall the same thing happened with Anarchy online. They released the game for sale but then told reviewers to hold off on their reviews because the game wasn't actually 'final'. Sure enough, reviewers didn't do their job and waited around till the Anarchy folks actually felt their game was 'ready'. This all boils down to game companies not wanting to be accountable for their lousy work. Really if you're going to be spending millions and millions of dollars on a game, you should at the very least make sure it's actually worth playing.

Re:Hmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

The German site also claims to have their version legally bought, which means that they could immediately charge Atari for making unfounded claims against them (based on the laws of coersion/intimidation and also the laws against threatening with legal action).