Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Lawsuits over the incident responsible for putting the ESRB on high alert may be headed for a settlement. That would be the Hot Coffee incident from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas about two years ago.

As with most settlements, this one has Rockstar admitting no fault in the matter and the small press statement accompanying it is the most sane thing I’ve probably ever heard Rockstar utter about the matter:

“If the case had continued, we believe the court would have agreed that Take-Two was not liable for consumers acting independently to modify their games with third-party hardware and software to access normally inaccessible content,” Take-Two CEO Ben Feder said in a statement.

This is in marked contrast to the outright stupidity shoveled at the gaming press by Rockstar when this whole scandal broke. They should have known way back then that the coverup is always worse than the crime. The caveat to that rule is that you can actually successfully cover things up if you have very large amounts of money, good lawyers, and can wait out the attention span of the media. I’ll leave it up to the reader to find their own favorite examples of that in the computer technology world. Rockstar isn’t one of those companies, but given how long it has taken for them to try and settle it looks like they drew it out long enough to probably tire out some of the plaintiffs.

The proposed remedies to customers include a cash payment for those who can offer proof of purchase before a certain date provided the customers swear, and here’s another key thing, that they were:

“offended and upset by the ability of consumers to modify and alter the game’s content” with the mod

This has always hinged on modding and I think Rockstar was completely unfairly singled out about this from the beginning. Was the ESRB long overdue for more scrutiny? Certainly, and this has probably made it far more vigilant, helping more consumers overall.

Seen on Gamespot.