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 problem is..

[thegrassyknowl]

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

So..

[Turn-X Alphonse]

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.

Re:The sad thing here is

[westlake]

They'd have made a lot of enemies

Take Two had all the enemies it could stand.

It says something when upstate New York soccer moms, the Haitian poor of Miami, Las Vegas prostitutes and center-right politicians everywhere unite in a common cause.

Take Two tried damage control.
Then HC was found embedded in the console ports of the game...

Re:The sad thing here is

[supabeast!]

What you're clearly missing here is that Take-Two/Rockstar never had any chance at controlling this and coming out on top. It didn't matter what Take-Two/Rockstar said in their own defense, because this entire story exists because the American news media serves mainly to titilate its audience with twisted facts taken out of context followed by a lot of outright lies. And nobody was ever going to come to Take-Two/Rockstar's aid, because they're just a bunch of rich white nerds making games for a living, they don't fit into popular concepts of victims needing defense.

Take-Two/Rockstar are just as much a victim of America's depraved acceptance of a media that's little better than the state-controlled media of facist regimes than it is the developer's own stupidity.

Reality Check

[webmistressrachel]

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?

Aw, diddums

[payndz]

Did the poor widdle shareholders lose money when they thought all they could do was win, win, win?

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.

Re:The problem is..

[bergeron76]

We're not mad, our government is.

Re:So..

[surprise_audit]

Yeah, that about sums it up. I would only add, that suing a company's who's stock you own is exactly like shooting yourself in the foot. The company may fire the programmers, then their next game may not be such a big seller, the stock tanks and the shareholders lose *more* money.

In the interests of poetic justice, any settlement the company makes with the shareholders ought to be in the form of more shares... Imagine taking *that* for a spin through the courts if/when the stock takes a hit: "Boo hoo, they gave us shares and now they're not worth so much because they fired the programmers that we sued them over last time..."

Re:The sad thing here is

[kreyg]

The main point is that it is impossible to access the mini-game through any mechanism provided by the game as distributed - you need to either modify the game or the save file. It's not something you can stumble across accidentally. Unless you are intentionally looking for it, you'll never see it.

If you are intentionally looking for such things, it's vastly easier to find something racier on the net than what is effectively a Ken and Barbie doll suggestively animated. Regardless of any wrongdoing, the whole issue has been blown so far out of proportion it boggles the mind.

Re:The sad thing here is

[KDR_11k]

What makes you think it was an unauthorized action that landed the code in there? Isn't it more likely that the feature was planned and approved but as the game drew closer to finishing the manager responsible got cold feet and ordered it to be removed again?

Moral panic

[FidelCatsro]

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