MJames70

Gamestop is scummy, no doubt.  Opening something and selling it as new is the issue, and  is a poor business practice. Removal of an item that was included without their knowledge that promotes a competitor is hardly as bad. Especially if they had no idea it was going to be included, which I believe as reports of the OnLive deal did not show up until the game shipped. The correct approach would have been to refuse to sell the game, period. Which is what they should have done, and gone after Square-Enix for including it. 
 
Finally, I am disappointed in Giant Bomb and Alex for the tone and content of this article. It appeared GB was trying to take strides to be seen as a 'serious' gaming news outlet. Posting an article like this undermines that greatly. It reeks of fanboyism you expect to find on some third rate website. If you want to be taken seriously, you have news and editorials clearly marked. The right thing to do would have been to post the story, and then have a post by Alex titled 'Gamestop Sucks' or whatever. Crossing the line between news and hit piece may get cheering from the haters, but is not a good business policy either. Just like opening items and selling them as new....

The big difference with that incident and this one is that the xbox downtime was a flatout server crash on 360, and not a comprimised network that was hacked maliciously and comprimised data there is a big difference. "

Most people underestimate the great Xbox Live outage of a couple years back that got us that copy of crappy Undertow....I had no or minimal connectivity to Live for almost three weeks. Getting a copy of Undertow and some time on my Live subscription did most certainly not make up for missing one of the busiest gaming periods of the year with my friends....

There really is nothing that they could realistically offer to me that would make me 'feel better' over this. Can't put a dollar value on trust, and that is totally gone now, and may never come back or take a very long time. I will certainly think twice before buying any PSN content now, and it will be with point cards only.

What will all those people who were saying yesterday that there was no chance of this, it was just some hackers getting goodies for free say now? Fortunately my exposure on PSN was limited in that the login/PW is not good on any other sites, but it is still alarming and frustrating....this is after being caught up in Kotaku's **** up info breach a few months back. Trust no one online seems to be the only recourse...

Something else...apparently Giant Bombs so called 'dick sucking' of Harmonix didn't do much for the game or the company....the point in the Activision memo about RB3 was that its sales were still poor, despite all the critical praise. So even if you make what is considered a quality game, it is a sign of genre trouble when it doesn't sell.

I'm not sure how much 'reinventing' there can be in a genre that involves notes dropping down a highway...at some point in the future, after it has been away for a while, it may be able to return as a 'niche' genre or with a nostalgia factor to it. But all those dreams of these games saving the music industry that was being proclaimed a few years ago seems a little ironic now...

The longer it goes on with little or no details from Sony other than 'We don't know', the more worried I get....If five days later it was just a hack that did not affect consumers and only gave away free goodies to hackers, they should have said so by now. Instead we get nothing  publicly other than we don't know what happened or when it will be up again.....scary.

Most definitely YES. Extraction will ask for the Dead Space 2 disc even after it has been 'installed'. 

So this is the crap we end up with instead of working on the Penny Arcade games?