Games Media Fail: GTA V Not Confirmed

GTA V Fraud

I’ve long been hard on video game “journalism”, especially when it comes to getting news and scoops about games from voice actors and people not directly involved with the development of the game, but I’ve kept my silence. Until now. You may have heard on numerous sites on the Internet (but not this one) that news of Grand Theft Auto V had leaked. How did this get out? Someone checked the IMDB profile of Declan Mulvey and saw he was credited as being in Grand Theft Auto V.

And what did many sites do? They ran with it, many of them even bothering to contact Rockstar or Take-Two for confirmation, forgetting that real journalists get confirmation BEFORE running a story, not after. And lo and behold, it turns out that it was a typo, as Eurogamer so helpfully points out. It was meant to read Grand Theft Auto IV, not V.

Do things like this bother you? They seriously get under my skin. All this running around, checking out domain registers, talking to voice actors and then walking back stories is starting to get old. It makes the whole games media look juvenile. Am I being too harsh here? Or is this just the state of the Internet these days? Go!

Source – EuroGamer