G4 Goes Down, Internet Gets Excited

Activision vs. Infinity Ward was big news, probably the biggest news we’ve had in this relatively slow news week. The internet and the gaming press exploded in analysis, counter analysis, Deep Throat style sourcing, unconfirmed reports and speculation. The update tag, a way of telling the reader a story has progressed, was used several times on single posts due to the speed and complexity of the story.

Our post took two attempts to write because the story progressed so dramatically while it was being edited. For a reader it was hard to keep up and for blogs and news sites, even tougher. The folks at Binge Gamer were even accused of being ‘œunsophisticated’ by none other than Michael Pachter for the way the released allegations of missing royalty payments.

On Friday morning, amongst all of the rumours G4, which had sourced the majority of the information, went down. Across the web, and possibly most notably on Twitter, playful speculation suggested that Activision had something to do with the downtime. Not many sites jumped on the story as most, like us, were keeping our eyes on the situation for more information.

UK based site CVG decided to run a story breaking news that the site was down and questioning whether it was a technical problem ‘œor if there’s another explanation’. That ‘œother explanation’ was the suggestion that Activision had brought the site down through legal means because of the revelations coming from G4‘s ‘œsources close to Activision’. (Something that is surprisingly within the realms of possibility.)

Once G4 came back online eight hours later (G4 is based on the West coast of the USA, so the site went down in the middle of the night and was up at around 10am local time) it seemed like CVG, as well as a couple other sites had jumped the gun a little.  They quickly updated their posts saying that everything was fine and gave a reason (sourced from CVG) for the service disruption; ‘œit looks like it’s had a redesign.’

Negative Gamer contacted G4 to confirm why the site went down and if they had indeed had a redesign (that seemingly the entire internet hadn’t noticed). They told us “[it] was a simple bug that we fixed as soon as we woke up (it occurred overnight)” which is rather less exciting than the Activision conspiracy. They added that ‘œ[the] conspiracy theories were totally entertaining though.’

But what about this redesign, where had this information that CVG updated their story with come from? CVG said they would update the story when they got official word from G4, but G4 didn’t mention any redesign? We have contacted CVG for comment, but (likely because the email was sent after UK business hours) we have yet to receive a reply.

We do have a theory though. Scrolling down to the comment section on CVG‘s story we see a post by “sweetasman01″ saying:

Its working fine here, seems they have had a redesign.

Which make it seem, at least to me, that CVG based its update on a single comment on their article. Probably not the best practice.

The internet, with all its uses, has brought us instant news. Something can happen and within minutes, or even seconds, we know about it. But that doesn’t mean that we need to. News sites need to be careful to not overdo the immediacy of their news and to make sure that facts are checked more thoroughly.