NEW YORK, NY — What if they won a class action suit and nobody cared enough to cash in on it? That appears to be the crocodile tear laden tragedy faced by 11 law firms poised to profit from a non-existent outrage against sex in violent games.Attorney Seth Lesser is disappointed that the fury – and greed – aren’t what he’d anticipated. After all, what gamer worth their salt wouldn’t consider Lesser and his fellow legal eagles anything less than saviors for having brought the forces of evil at Take-Two and Rockstar Games to their financial knees in a class action suit protesting sexual Easter eggs hidden among all the glorious Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas violence?
Although the so-called Hot Coffee mod required more than a small amount of cooperation and focused energy on the part of the player to activate, Lesser and team were able to pressure Take-Two into paying between $5 – $15 to anyone thin-skinned enough to both save their receipts and be offended by the unofficial sex game that lurked beneath GTA’s otherwise unwholesome, but official, storyline.
Alas, Lesser mourns, only 2,676 people have reaped the benefit of his hard work.
“Am I disappointed? Sure,” he told the New York Times. “We can’t guess as to why now, several years later, people care or don’t care. The merits of the case were clear.”
If by “clear,” Lesser means profitable to him and his fellow defenders of boob-free gaming consoles, he’d be correct. All told, Take-Two is being asked to pay them $1.3 million. That’s impressive by anyone’s standards, but especially impressive when one realizes that less than $300,000 has gone to claimants.
Many think the other thing that’s clear is that the case was meritless from the get-go, which is why the line to Take-Two’s bank account is mostly populated by lawyers.
Theodore Frank, director of the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute suggested to the Times that “There are two possibilities. Possibility One is: they have a meritorious lawsuit and they’re selling out the class for attorneys’ fees. The other possibility is that, and frankly, I think this is the more likely possibility: they brought a meritless lawsuit that had no business being brought to court at all.”
Maybe Lesser and company have learned a lesson about the reality of community standards. Unfortunately, it’s going to be Take-Two and Rockstar Games that pay for the lesson, even though its message is in their favor.
