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Surprisingly Few People Collect On GTA Hot Coffee
Relin writes "Out of the millions eligible, less than 3,000 have come forward to collect their money in the 'Hot Coffee' settlement. While the plaintiffs' lawyer is surprised by the development, Theodore Frank of the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute seems convinced that the lawsuit was 'meritless' and will result in no payment for the legal counsel opposing Take-Two."
I wonder what % of those collecting 5$ are just retailers and wholesalers.
And when I paid for GTA, I actually wanted that 5$ to go to Take Two. And I STILL want them to have it.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
I wonder what the networth of the attention take 2 got from this is worth. Surely far more than the cost of paying out the penalty and the fees of the lawers that they probably have on full time retainer anyhow.
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
Maybe this vocal minority is smaller than believed? Meanwhile, the rest of us are able to distinguish fantasy and reality, do not find the former offensive, and would prefer seeing naked human bodies engaged in sex acts rather than human bodies being brutally blown apart.
I say we cap the legal fees at 50% of the final settlement - IE for each $5 'settlement' received they get $5.
So instead of $1.3M, at the moment they've 'earned' ~$12k.
It'd stop some of the stupider lawsuits. I still remember getting a settlement offer for some memory I bought from crucial years ago - as far as I was concerned, I paid a fair price for it. Crucial sold me quality memory at a price seen more for shady chips.
Before I ever started going after the profit margin on computer chips I'd take a look at the jewelry industry.
I figure that most of the <3k individuals are just after a buck(five-thirty five).
On my end, if I was the judge or jury(don't know how it was decided), I'd have thrown out the case from the sheer fact that you had to download a mod to enable the content. Might as well sue 3DRealms for the mod to Duke Nukem that put actual porno on the movie screens, made the strippers actually strip(sorta), and all around more explicit. Don't mention the fact that it was a straight image swap with the more explicit stuff.
Heck, 'Hot Coffee' has made the value of the first edition of the game(before new disks were issued) more valuable!
That shows deliberate work on the part of the player. Like others have said, they could have as easily downloaded far more explicit porn, not to mention outright sex games about as easily.
I don't read AC A human right
It's sort of obvious, you can't have sex with a whore, but killing her is alright. This is where the game crosses the lines of correct morality.
*shakes head at this crazy country he lives in*
I'm a GTA San Andreas player who was not at all interested in money from Take Two because of the Hot Coffee content in the game. I'm not surprised that only a handful of people have taken them up on it, the game is limited to sale to a 17+ audience, an audience that already knows (except in the states whos names start and end with a vowel) that people have sex.
I *DO* however wonder how many of those 3,000 people were really offended by the Hot Coffee content, and how many were just going "Cool, free money!"
The Hot Coffee patch reminds me of ROT-13 encryption. It's trivial for someone to get at the content if they want to, but you have to deliberately go after it. You can't "accidentally" see it. You're saying "I know this might offend me, and I want to see it anyway".
We sadly live in a culture where it's more acceptable to beat up or kill a woman than it is to have sex with her. Which explains a lot of unfortunate things. It doesn't make them right though.
You want to know what is really offensive? And I don't think I'm alone here... I find it particularly offensive that someone would sue over this. And win.
I had so much hope for our species.
Sean
This doesn't apply to any versions of the game sold outside of the US, correct?
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
It's called a political opportunity. It's not about reality, its about aligning yourself to an issue and making news. "The choir, let me preach to it."
Besides, in laymans terms, the game contained material not suitable for the rating it received. The amount of work you have to do to "unlock" it via the patch (and I did out of curiosity - it took 5 minutes) is trivial, but the joke is, the only reason I became aware of it is because of the news.
Lets face it - it was sloppy of Take Two. They didn't deserve the attention and the suit, but it would have been easily preventable. Having shipped more than a few console games myself in my day, I can assure you that whatever didn't enable the game mechanic of bangin your gf in the build was 'removed' on a pretty high level - just a boolean or the removal of a game event or trigger.
I agree with everyone saying the lawsuit was meritless, but its a valuable lesson for all game developers. (Case in point: my friend wrote something obscene on a texture in a game that would never be readable by a customer with the in game camera. Clients get a 'free camera' mode where they can run through everything, up to any level of detail. Guess who falls on the 'right' side here? The people paying the money. My employers and the client were rightly not amused. Whats to be gained?) Ship a violent movie, and a super ultra softcore porn scene that isn't accessible via the movie on one DVD ... there is political weight to taking issue with that, if only because its possible to access it and because if its not meant to be accessed, what is it doing there?
So to summarize, it was a meritless lawsuit, for obvious reasons, but I don't have much sympathy for Take-Two unless it was one developer who kept the assets in there technically unbeknownst to everyone else. I doubt that was the case, and while they didn't deserve the lawsuit, they certainly opened themselves to misguided criticism. There are more stable platforms to assert one's distain for overly heavy handed sexual censorship.
I don't have to agree with somebody to necessarily not want to provide the opportunity for them to feel provoked, especially when money or political power is involved, no matter how fucking stupid they might be.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Reminds me of Duke Nukem were all the sex scenes were cut out but could be activated by typing in a code word. Here is a game were you can blow peoples heads off and swear but oooh no, boobies are not allowed.......sheesh
The opt out usually precedes the case. It gives the people bringing the case more leverage to actually get a settlement.
Take this case for instance, if you wanted to put it to Take Two, would you take the $5, or would you make one of their lawyers spend a couple of hours doing paper work for another case? If the opt out came after the agreement, Take Two would work a lot harder not settling.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The system isn't designed to compensate victims, it's designed to discourage hurting them in the first place. If lawyers didn't make tons of money on class action suits, no one would litigate them and companies would lose a disincentive to causing small amounts of harm to large amounts of people. Not that this point is relevant to the case in question...
My daughter and her friend were, I was unfortunate enough to overhear it :(
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
> which means that the only people who Take2 was (legally) selling the game to
Do what now? To the best of my knowledge, there is no law in most (all?) states which gives any force of law to either ESRB or MPAA ratings... and I think this is a good thing. This means that private businesses may choose to self-limit their sales to minors if they believe that they'll more than make it up in public good will generating replacement sales. It means that if certain standards differ from state to state or locale to locale, companies are free to make their own call locally. Even better, as public opinion changes over time, policies can adjust without dealing with the political process.
I'm worried, though, that your comment is representative of the general impression - but it worries me when people are afraid of breaking non-existent laws.
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
Everyone who wants to impose their values on the world, or proclaim their superiority, calls themselves "enlightened". It's a great word, because, who doesn't want to be enlightened? And, it's nice and vague. Mormans, Southern Baptists, and all sorts of religious extremists call themselves "enlightened". So do strong-atheists.
I object to your characterization of sex as polyamorous. While some people enjoy that, I don't particularly. I don't enjoy penises being inserted into me either though, so I recognize that it takes all types to make up the world. I enjoy my "intense feelings".
I tend to avoid sleeping with girls who are unattractive because I don't want to. There's also an increased chance of STDs with more partners, etc. etc.
What's wrong with the violence that sex causes? I mean, you have to respect safe words, but other than that...
Your ad here. Ask me how!
With class action lawsuits, all the risk is borne by the lawyers. If they don't win, they don't get paid. People whine that the consumer gets a $20 coupon while the lawyers make bank, but the consumer is getting something with no effort made or risk taken on his own. So if you don't like it, hire your own damn attorney and file your own damn lawsuit.
They say the devil's greatest trick was convincing the world he didn't exist. The devil has been one-upped; people in America have been brainwashed into thinking that standing up for themselves through unions or lawsuits is bad. They would rather money stay in the hands of those that wronged them rather than have it fall into the hands of (gasp) lawyers. They'd rather save $1000 a year in union dues rather than make another $10 an hour with 50% more vacation time. Americans excel at cutting off our noses to spite our faces.
Read between the lines. Religions weren't made for fun, but to guide people without providing explanation and proof to every detail, even those people who have nothing to lose (by telling them they have a soul and afterlife they can still lose).
This might be the real reason - having sex with a whore would just spread "the plague". And since there was having no way to heal them, killing is the only choice.
The fact that they can keep virgins confirms this - if you're really killing women because "These are the very ones who followed Balaam's advice and caused the people of Israel to rebel against the LORD at Mount Peor," then what gives virgins extra protection?
Seems I went a bit offtopic...
That McDonald's hot coffee thing had more to it than a simple 2 word description would give (go figure). Apparently McDonald's was the only big business in the US to have coffee that friggin hot... it was something ludicrous like 20 or 30 degrees hotter than normal coffee. Normal coffee would be like "ouch, that was hot, damn"... the old version before the lawsuit of McDonald's coffee was "OMFG I JUST GOT 3rd DEGREE BURNS, i'm DYING!". And the lid had a glitch or something to make sure you'd spill it if held a certain way. Notice how McDonald's lids now are like the best lids at fast food places... you can't spill shit now.
It's actually not that surprising . . . most people that buy a GTA game knows what kind of content to expect in the game (namely M rated stuff), so the hot coffee probably isn't enough to make these people want to get money from Take Two (that and $5 isn't worth the effort)