Few gamers claim Grand Theft Auto 'hot coffee' cash
$35? Nah, you keep it
$93,660 (£47,201/€59,631) can’t be much to the publisher of Grand Theft Auto. But that’s the paltry maximum amount it could've paid out so far over the infamous ‘hot coffee’ incident in GTA: San Andreas, simply because hardly anyone’s filed a claim.
To refresh your memory, ‘hot coffee’ was the name given to a sequence within GTA: San Andreas that allowed players to perform sexual acts with background characters.
A lawsuit was brought against Take-Two Interactive - publisher of Grand Theft Auto, and the company later agreed to pay between $5 and $35 to anyone who had bought the game and was offended by the scenes - which were not enabled by default, but required a special hack to activate.
But, according to Seth Lesser, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, only 2676 people have come forward to claim their cash, so far. "We can't guess as to why now, several years later, people care or don't care. The merits of the case were clear,” Lesser said.
The irony is that the 11 law firms that brought the action against Take-Two are said to have claimed around $1.3m (£655,000/€828,000) in legal fees.
COMMENTS
At the risk of point out the obvious
For the hard of understanding, ie, anyone who's made a claim for being 'upset' by the 'mod':
"...the scenes - which were not enabled by default, but required a special hack to activate."
So basically, the people who took their time to go and FIND this forgotten part of the program are being compensated for their own effort? Surely the gimp who hacked GTA should be the one up in front of the judge for hacking the program, and subsequently posting it publicly? Anyone think of that? Or even that the people who claimed compensation can't genuinely have been upset, because they knew what they were going to find and thought it would be a bit of a laugh?
Or does common sense fail to work in court nowadays?
Re: It looked better on the PS2
Who really gives a crap? It both looked and played better on the PC than both of those.
As for the Hot Coffee payouts... I guess most of the world's gamers are actually sane enough to recognise that a 3rd party mod is not the game vendors responsibility.
It looked better on the PS2
Than on the inferior XBox, which was also rubbish because it couldn't stand on its side.
PS2 version:
http://tinyurl.com/557lsq
XBox version:
http://tinyurl.com/6sb3jp
