Sony and Kotaku kerfuffle erupts

THE MAKER OF of exploding batteries and expensive games consoles has had a tiff with an online gaming magazine which was set to get a bit out of hand.

The handbags at dawn kerfuffle took place after Kotaku penned a speculation piece on some new technology that was to ship with the PS3 that would allow gamers to create a virtual world for customized avatars and then decorate that space with items unlocked through game play.

All fairly tame stuff, but apparently the hacks had a devil of a job standing up the story even from the point of view that it was just a rumour.

First Sony asked them not to publish the yarn, then it played it down as a rumour, then it turned nasty and said that if Kotaku published the story it would harm Sony's professional relationship with the mag. Sony would demanded that the hacks return the PS3 it 'loaned them' and would ballball the magazine from any meetings with Sony and its contacts.

Kotaku decided to 'publish and be damned' and got a hurt email from Dave Karraker, the senior director of corporate communications for Sony Computer Entertainment of America. He said he had pulled out all stops to work with the magazine and took a lot of flak from inside his organisation for doing so. Karraker said he couldn't defend outlets that "can't work cooperatively" with us. In other words do as your told or the gravy train will congeal in the station.

And so Kotaku was banned. Not only did the rumour look accurate given the great effort that Sony had made to gag the mag, but the bogging community started penning more phlegm that had been seen in the Internet community since Dr Spinola wrote a piece of bile about Linux.

As Kotaku editor Brian Crecente said it just showed the difference in goals between hacks and Spinners. Just because an outfit is nice to a magazine should not mean that its hacks are just going to write what the spinners want. Unless they are Apple magazines of course.

Apparently Karraker realised that this was going to be a lot more trouble than it was worth. He got on the blower and Sony and Kotaku are all friends again. And they all lived happily ever after. More tales here. µ