But if we're talking expensive coffee, the priciest is the one served up with the now-infamous 'Hot Coffee' scandal with which Take-Two found itself saddled when a mod unlocked some hidden no-no content. Years of media hype, legal battles and other consequences of the incident's spectre followed.
It was expensive. Really expensive, and that's just adding up the costs we can materially quantify. I took a look at the cost of Hot Coffee in an editorial at Gamasutra today -- and found the real costs go way beyond the monetary.
And they go way beyond Take-Two. The entire industry paid for that one little mini-game, when you think about it. Agree?
24 comments:
Completely absurd. Millions of dollars lost and a media firestorm over a minigame involving badly rendered people pantomiming sex acts hidden in a game full of brutal violence and inaccessible without an external mod. It's truly sad how backwards our country's attitudes are towards sex and violence.
By "hot coffee" logic paying for sex with a prostitute is all fine and well but having a consensual sexual relationship with a partner you have gotten to know through several dates is unacceptable. Sounds like the morality of a politician to me.
The author seems to be saying that because the "Hot Coffee" scandal made it more difficult for games to be taken seriously, it owes the industry some sort of reparations. However, this whole argument is moot due to the fact is that Take Two only has obligations to its shareholders and maximizing its profits for them. Certainly, this scandal didn't hurt (and even possibly helped) the huge sales of GTA IV, and there's very little the rest of the industry can do to incentivize reparations short of encouraging boycotts (and we saw how well that worked for Shadow Complex--consumers' desire for entertainment drives their purchases, not their principles). Blaming Take Two for hurting games' image is like blaming any movie studio for churning out all the crap they do on an annual basis. They're going to do what's going to turn them the biggest profit. If developers want a better representation of the medium, the best thing they can do is make one themselves.
Haha, I haven't read the article yet, but I love the segue. :D
On the topic of the article: I think that the issue itself isn't so much the scandal compared to the way Take Two dealt with it. If I am remembering correctly, they pretty much lied and ended up undermining the ESRB. I think it's on that basis that they should be punished.
I doubt the sales generated by media coverage (ephemeral as they are) came anywhere near covering the legal fees, Armchair, to say nothing of the 20 million in fines. That's a pretty egregious error to make towards the people writing your paychecks.
There's also the added community backlash which can be seen indirectly in flare ups like the Fox News-Mass Effect fiasco et. al. We can also see echoes of Rockstar's decision to leave the content in in some of the more embarassing and alienating aspects of recent marketing schemes. I'm thinking of EA's hamhanded attempts at promoting Dante's Inferno specifically.
We have to start thinking about how this sort of shit makes us look and acting accordingly if we want to start sitting at the big boy's table. Given the perception of games as a childish boy's club with a pervasive perception of women as objects coloring our craft and discussion slip ups like the one Rockstar had with Hot Coffee serve only to shoehorn us into a place many developers are trying painfully hard to work out of.
Damn the Bay Area and its lack of Dunkin' Donuts. Sigh.
NO! I am tired of people saying that Starbucks is expensive.
It is NOT 4 dollars to buy a coffee.
it's 1.85 for a 20 oz coffee and that's NOT expensive!
Michael, you miss the point of my comment. Whether the costs to the company as a result of "Hot Coffee" were "worth it" in comparison to whatever publicity and sales the company picked up is besides the point. The article already establishes that the executives involved that didn't fulfill their fiduciary duty were ousted as a way to appease the shareholders.
I don't disagree with you that the hidden code, included to be found or otherwise, negatively affects how video games are presented--I think that point is generally understood by anyone in the community that cares about how games are perceived. My point is that wagging one's finger scoldingly at Take Two is a waste of time. Whether they're more careful in the future about this sort of thing in the future will come down to whether it will cost them--respect for the medium is beside the point for them.
I want to see games taken seriously by our culture as much as any other gamer. But expecting accountability from public companies in this regard is trying to get blood from a stone. We can express our disapproval as consumers, but let's have no illusions about the goals of the parties involved.
I pay $1.68 Canadian for a 12oz cup of coffee from Starbucks... we don't have Dunkin Donuts up here but I can't imagine it being THAT much cheaper than $1.68
/nitpick
Armchair, I was just talking about your mention of the scandal potentially helping sales of GTA IV.
And I think we're starting to see a degree of artistic integrity and responsibility in (I can't believe I'm saying this) EA. Even with their schizophrenic marketing enterprises Riccitiello is really presenting himself as a positive force and giving his developers free reign to try new ideas, even if they aren't always successes. I'm not saying we're going to see this sort of trend emerge in general, but it does behoove companies themselves to take care about the content they publish lest they, as Rockstar proved, be slapped on the wrist.
As for your previous comment regarding the effectiveness of boycotts, for every Shadow Complex there's also a Gamecock. Sometimes the choices people make with their money regarding strange little games can make or break a company. I will agree, however, that the discussion of Shadow Complex seemed to pique interest in the game more than interest in any sort of boycott.
Anyhow, I agree that for a company like Activision integrity is a meaningless word. But I think that its competitors would do well to, as EA has of late, portray themselves as responsible community members. I might be a select case, but every time I hear about Kotick acting like a dick and Riccitiello trying to get some new IP off the ground my heart goes out a little more to EA, and my dollars tend to follow.
/nitpick
David said it all in the first post, it's ridiculous that the Hot Coffee content was a scandal at all, given the nature of all the other content in GTA: San Andreas. In the core game you can pick up hookers, drive them to a remote location, have sex with them, then brutally kill them to get your money back, and take photos of their dead bodies to add to your picture collection. And that's just one example of the twisted things available for you to do in such an open world. There are far more disturbing things to do in the game than have sex. Our culture just doesn't have its collective head on straight when it comes to sexuality or violence.
This is what's called a 'life lesson' - one perhaps the entire game industry, not only Rock Star, needed.
It hurts but if it didn't hurt we wouldn't learn.
"Life lesson?" HA!
Michael, I also would consider myself a "select case" in that regard, but I have a lot of cynicism in that "select" is probably pretty accurate. I do wish gamers as a whole would reward the development games into something more than they are now, because it's all our dollars that ultimately drive the industry. As you said, smaller companies can really be leaned on when their customer base is small (I assume your reference to Gamecock was regarding their VGA behavior, though I wasn't aware they suffered significant blowback from sales as a result). However, I feel too many gamers don't care about the future of games to stand on principle. I started this conversation by saying the author of the op-ed was wasting his time by chiding Take Two for its failure to shape the medium's perception. He should point his ire at the consumer base instead; they're just as unlikely to take action, but at least they *should*.
Appreciate the reporting in that article (figures for damages, and how the lawsuits turned out)
I think everyone paid for it, but I don't think everyone should have. It's a shame that this hit the video game world so hard, despite the fact that it took modification to get to. Once something is modified, especially if it's modified in such a way that it can't be modified out of the box without other tools, it shouldn't really be the developer/publishers problem anymore. If I make a lawnmower, and someone modifies it so that the blades stick out past the edges of the lawnmower, I shouldn't be at fault for damage caused.
Nick, that's a pretty lousy analogy for the situation. It's more like if you built a lawnmower that had blades sticking out past the sides and then fix a plastic guard around the lawnmower which can be removed using a screwdriver instead of just designing the lawnmower in a responsible fashion in the first place.
Wow, it's really hard to make lawnmower analogies work in the first place. Maybe we should try a different dangerous household device, like a power drill or a table saw.
First off, the contrarians to the Starbucks stuff are right. Starbucks coffee is more expensive, but not by much, and definitely not 4 dollars. If you want a fruity or frozen drink that only Tingle himself would be comfortable wielding, that will be 4 dollars. Coolattas at DD are also very expensive. No money figures here since prices change with location and often the franchisee's whim.
On Hot Coffee, I agree with Si. It's ridiculous to say that a simulated sex act with a consenting partner is more "obscene" than a more nuanced simulated sex act inside a car with a prostitute.
Problem is that the ESRB will tag anything like Hot Coffee with the AO rating, also known as the retail Kiss of Death. People would surely buy it, but no one would sell it.
"The entire industry" needs to re-think its rating system before anything like this will be solved. Even better, retail stores need to figure out how to deliver all content and stop censoring something that someone may deem "obscene." Even better than that, we all need to pull our heads out of wherever they happen to be and start working toward a society more open to surface-level visuals of all sorts, therefore getting rid of every cost associated with this stupid GTA ordeal.
Exception to my last post - when I'm talking about "delivering all content" I'm not talking about the actual substance of a story, I'm talking about your typical ESRB descriptions of surface material - "Nudity," "Sex," etc. and not harmful or abusive idea-pushing or anything like that... but now we're in gray territory anyway, the nature of the problem here. Oh well.
When I said "someone that may deem..." I was referring to any insane situation where someone could file an unwarranted complaint about something that would usually be quite harmless but only interpreted the wrong way by any Joe Tipper Gore out there.
Geez, and I re-read this stuff! Shame!
it's funny, I actually thought they got off light since almost no one claimed their recompense from the lawsuits. Apparently, I was totally wrong. Regardless, I agree with David. Why does this country make things like this part-and-parcel with the devil? Give me a break. Leigh, by the way, that was a good piece on Gamasutra. I really hadn't thought about the whole picture in the way you laid it out. Good stuff. But overall, I really think we need to get over ourselves as a nation and just grow up.
Nice to meet you.
I was going to paste the link without permission because I had very felt the interest for your blog.
Please link me with the blog if it is good.
URL:http://hiro-anniversary.blogspot.com/
E-mail:h-mori@ibs-office.com
Never really understood the concept that consensual sex is worse than murder and killing either.
What really makes me nervous is the whole attitude towards it all. The culture of most Western countries do think gaming are still for little children (despite the incredible amount of violence), and it sounds like that the culture needs to change.
Post a Comment