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 sad thing here is

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The sad thing here is

[Sigma 7]

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

Actually, they do - all they need to create is a bounty where the first person to produce said sex scene in an unmodified game gets a prize (e.g. $25000 - within most corporate advertising budgets as the media does much of the advertising for the company instead, leaving a massive surplus.)

Perodically increase the bounty based on the number of negative press - which will make an impossible task much more lucrative. After all, if Hot Coffee is so popular/hyped, it should be easy to find without modifications, right?

As long as the bounty still stands unachieved (regardless of cash prise or otherwise), it is a dent in the credibility. Even if it doesn't have legal weight (IANAL), it still inches public opinion in their favour.

BTW, I'm really suprised that this game [gamespot.com] was not banned several times over.