Bad Review = Lawsuit?
Publisher Atari has filed suit against German site 4Players for publishing a negative review of Alone in the Dark before the release date of June 20th. Atari claims they had just sent out review copies and therefore the review had been based on an illegally pirated copy.
The problem? Apparently other sites had the same accusations leveled at them, and this little tidbit came out from Gamer.nl.
"Within an hour [after posting], Atari called to have the review pulled off, claiming there was an embargo till Friday," Bergervoet said in a comment to Shacknews. "Our review copy was sent directly to us by Atari and [was] not a pirated copy. They explicitly told [Gamer.nl] that they only let high scoring reviews break the post-release embargo date."
After that, it's fairly hard to take Atari seriously if they say they were only concerned about piracy, (piracy may have indeed been involved for some of these reviews, as the game was leaked on the net early), because obviously they were more concerned with the score. Shacknews has the full story below.
Atari Sues over Negative Alone in the Dark Review, Accuses Reviewer of Piracy [ShackNews]
Sgt. Sausagepants
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 24 June 2008
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: alone in the dark, atari, lawsuit, reviews
THATS the solution to atari's money problems! Sue review sites! Long live Atari!
This is historic! A game actually gets a lower score than the Uwe Boll film based upon it.
Seems like Atari realized that such bad publicity is even worse than negative reviews.
They sat together with 4players and discussed things personally, resulting in dropping all charges (and posing as if all this never happened).
Short Newsflash on 4players.de
Can I sue game devs for hiding the fact that their games suck? Trying to deceive consumers into buying crappy games, grr...
The game is not very good anyway so a negative review won't change peoples minds about the game either way, atari just suck it up and admit you have a lousy game. Happens to the best of them. It's unfortunate though that they were really hoping for a key title to boost $$$. Oh well we'll have to wait and see what's next.