Dopass.com

Rockstar Indicted In Los Angeles Over Hot Coffee - [Gamasutra - News] -- I can save you the trouble of reading the article. It says that the Los Angeles city attorney has sued Rockstar and Take Two over the 200,000 copies of San Andreas thought to have been sold in California prior to the whole Hot Coffee thing. Apparently, the central claim in the case is that Take Two misrepresented the product by not mentioning the content... I *know* some folks feel differently, so pardon me if I'm not making any friends, but isn't that ridiculous?

The content was never part of the finished product. It cannot be accessed without modifying the game or the memory space used by the game. There's no "secret code" to unlock this stuff; you have to use a hack - be it a patch or an action replay macro/code that tells the device what memory to modify. Sure, it was included on the disc, but the ELUAs for these games prohibit modification and reverse engineering as a matter of course. You'd have to break a contract just to discover them.

So, by the logic of this lawsuit (and really the entire Hot Coffee "controversy"), if I see a driver go by who drives his car on the sidewalk so that I have to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit, I can sue the driver and the car manufacturer (for allowing the capability to be driven on sidewalks), right? I can sue the dealership, too - I mean after all, they sold the car that could be driven on the sidewalk I was walking on - can't I? What about the city, for placing the sidewalks so close to cars? I can certainly criticize the DMV sharply for failing to enforce their "don't drive on the sidewalk" laws, right?

You think that's absurd? The driver is rockstar, the manufacture is Take 2, the dealership is Best Buy and the DMV is the ESRB. Yes, Rockstar did wrong by forgetting to physically remove that content after it had been functionally disabled, but how would Take Two know it was there? Or Best Buy, or the ESRB? It's ridiculous to blame anyone but Rockstar for this, and for that matter - is what Rockstar did so bad that they should be punished?

They left some code in that, if the game is unmodified (e.g. the only way to play it legally), cannot be executed. They left some assets on the disc that, if the game is played legally by the terms of the license, no one would ever see. Yep, you heard it here first, folks: Rockstar is guilty of bloat. Just like every single other game made by a large team of people working on a tight schedule. I've left so many bits of technically functional but disabled script in the games I've made it's not even funny. I'm not alone. It's a lazy practice, but it arises out of the way games are made.

I make a map and I have an idea for a great scripted sequence. I spend the time I have working on this extra bit of game-play scripting, but the deadline gets closer and closer and eventually I realize I don't have time to make this work and finish my actual milestone goals. So, I think to myself, "I'll come back to it next milestone when I have some time" and I disable it, instead of removing it. Sadly, the next milestone turns out to be worse and so on and I never get the chance to go back. The next thing I know, the disc is being pressed and boxes are being assembled; it's too late to go back and remove it. I'm sure it's the same way for everyone else.

For all we know those sex games were supposed to be part of their M-rated title to begin with, but never got the time it would take to polish them into live, professional content. Maybe the game was supposed to be AO originally. In fact, maybe after they'd disabled this content with the intent of fixing it later, they'd completely forgotten it was there, wrapped up the game and submitted their finished game to the ESRB. Since the ESRB isn't in the business of hacking games and modifying memory spaces, they rated the game itself, not all the junk on the disc, and rated it an M based on that.

Let me put it another way: Paris Hilton tapes her sex session with her boyfriend, thinking it would be private and no one else would see it. But her boyfriend becomes her ex-boyfriend and he puts the tape out. Is it wrong for Paris to sue the ex-boyfriend to try to get the tape out of the public eye? No? Of course not, she's the victim here, right?

Now imagine that Paris is Rockstar, the tape is the patch/hack needed to activated hot coffee and the ex-boyfriend is whichever dude leaked that hack on the internet. How is it any different here? Though Paris did make the tape, she didn't want her depictions of sex to be sold to anyone, just like Rockstar. Aren't they the victim here? After all, the Hot Coffee stuff is horrible game-play; it hurts their reputation just as badly as Paris thought her tape would hurt hers.

- Snipehunter