Inaccurate Reading Of SEC Filing Parroted By All Blogs Except This One
It’s so hard to say who first reported the news that 3D Realms was only going to get $4,250 for the publishing of Duke Nukem Forever due to a renegotiation of their contract with Take-Two. But that mistake is everywhere now.
The new deal was referenced as being reported in Take-Two’s most recent SEC filing. SEC filings always report figures in thousands of dollars. So Take-Two actually brought the payout down from $6 million to $4.25 million, stupids. It takes very little time to get the SEC filing off of Yahoo, and then CTRL-F to search for “Duke”. Less than a minute. Then you would have had a chance to see you were being dumb.
What you couldn’t have known from reading that, though, is that a) this is two month-old news, or five months if you were good at connecting old dots, and b) the payment isn’t going to 3D Realms, but rather has already gone to DNF’s original publisher, GT Interactive, now part of Atari. If you’ll recall GT also had gotten $6 million when they signed over the publishing rights to Take-Two in the first place, too, aka the smartest deal GT Interactive ever made. The truth is, 3D Realms is going to get nothing from Take-Two for shipping except a a royalty check or two before the game is laughed off of shelves.
You guys did nail the part about the $500,000 bonus if it ships before the end of the year, though! Except it also goes to Atari. Great blogging!
Quite a list of blogtardedness involved here:
GameSpot, probably Patient Zero, who passed it on to
Joystiq, whereupon
Destructoid got it, and got a typo mutation that left Take-Two offering themselves the $4,250.
Slashdot and Voodoo Extreme got caught by GameSpot, too.
Evil Avatar didn’t repeat or dispute the number but did have the money as going to 3D Realms.
Kotaku actually got the $4.25 million right but also said it would be going to 3D Realms.
As did Next Generation.
Again, “good job” to all of you, for getting stale news almost completely wrong.
June 11th, 2006 at 8:06 am
What’s really annoying about this is that the story error starts with establishment gaming media and then is simply assumed to be correct by almost everyone even though the 4500 dollar number is absurd on its face.
June 11th, 2006 at 11:12 am
It seems to me blogs should tell you where they are getting their news. Even if you have the link to the original story you should still put “found on gamespot” in the article.
June 12th, 2006 at 8:25 am
“It seems to me blogs should tell you where they are getting their news.”
They used to, back before they were called blogs. I’m pretty sure even the old voodooextreme and bluesnews used to source everything they ripped.
June 12th, 2006 at 9:46 am
Well, I think pretty much all of them did, except Next Generation, and GameSpot, who both sourced their story off the SEC filing.
The other links either explicitly credit GameSpot or have a link to GameSpot’s story.