Dragonclaw said:
Therumancer said:
Dragonclaw said:
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Corporate espionage? Really?.....no.....This is advertising and Square is well within their rights to offer advertising inside their packaging. They did not advertise on the box that the customer would get a free copy from OnLive and for THAT Gamestop should be thankful. Then I could see them not selling it. Or, as I said earlier having the OnLive advertisements in the openning credits or sporadically in the game itself. It is no more "espionage" than Burnout Paradise having it's billboards for Best Buy and Curcuit City...BOTH major competitors in game at ALL times.
It's quite differant because the billboards in the games were open to any bidder, it's just selling advertising space.
What they are doing is more akin to a business trying to poach customers from another business. Sort of like how if you run a store, and someone comes into your store from a competitor and starts handing out advertisements to your customers to tell them to go
accross town and get a better deal.
This becomes corperate espionage because in this case it's not that overt, it's a sabotage intent being conducted under the table. What's more it's being perpetuated through a third party that is acting under the pretensions of neutrality, and also not telling the party about to be victimized what is going on.
See, if I post publically that someone purchising my product can buy advertising space, that's one thing as long as I don't discriminate. On the other hand when I get in bed with another business directly and cut a deal like this with them... well, that's differant.
You'd feel a lot differant about it if you were a business owner and the people you buy from started promoting the business accross town.
Basically what happened was Onlive got in bed with Square Enix and they figured they could pull this off on Gamestop. They wound up getting caught.
I own a business and deal with a simillar situation every day...In many comic books there are not only ads for competing mega-stores but also many online services looking to cut retail out altogether...however you don't see me ripping out those pages of advertising...after all the main story would be unaffected and you'd still be getting the full story you paid for...just without the ads for my competition. My customers would be furious, and rightfully so.
The differance is that those periodicals sell those advertisements as part of their business, and that is understood to begin with. You could choose to take out an ad in one of those comic books and if you paid them they wouldn't refuse you.
In this case Square Enix is not running a periodical, or a business where they freely tell everyone "pay us and we'll put coupons in our boxes" to the point where you open up one of their video games and see all the offers from sponsors fall out in a huge pile. Basically Squeenix cut an unusual deal to support a specific company, and part of that deal was to
keep it on the down low which is why it was unknown until the games had already been distributed and only caught at the last minute. With comics your describing business as usual for any periodical, with video games this generally doesn't happen.
It becomes corperate espionage if you argue that the intent was to hurt other businesses by gaining an unfair advantage over them by tricking them into doing something self destructive.
As dramatic as the term "corperate espionage" sounds it covers a lot of ground. In this case the way how things went down means that Gamestop might be able to hold Squeenix and Online responsible for damages if they believe this caused them to lose business to onlive.
Now if Squeenix had told everyone "we're doing this, if you want your own coupon, pay us" publically it would have been differant, but as it is, this is kind of a shadowy, behind the scenes strategem intended to get chains like Gamestop to pass along advertisement for the competition without them knowing it (which is a key element here, it's differant when you carry a magazine knowing they sell ad space ahead of time).
