Few people offended by GTA porn

The Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas class-action was launched in 2005

Despite the furore over hidden sex scenes in Grand Theft Auto very few people were actually offended, according to details of the class action suit released today.

Rockstar Games will only have to pay out to 2,676 game owners after it agreed to settle a class action suit against it for including soft-core pornographic sex scenes that could only be accessed by installing a software tweak dubbed Hot Coffee.

In total the company, and its parent Take-Two Interactive, will have to pay around $35,000 to settle the claims, with individuals being refunded the cost of the game and getting a sanitised version. By contrast they will have to pay over $1.3 million in fees to the lawyers who bought the case.

“There are two possibilities,” Theodore H. Frank, who directs the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute, told the New York Times.

“Possibility one is they have a meritorious lawsuit and they’re selling out the class for attorneys’ fees. The other possibility is that, and frankly I think this is the more likely possibility, they brought a meritless lawsuit that had no business being brought to court at all.”

Lawyer who brought the class action suit against the companies have expressed disappointment that so few people actually claimed against the company but said that taking action was the right thing to do.

“Am I disappointed? Sure,” said Seth R. Lesser, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs.

“We can’t guess as to why now, several years later, people care or don’t care. The merits of the case were clear.”

The case arose after it was revealed that there was a hidden scene in the game which could be accessed by user who downloaded a third party modification and inserted it into the game’s software.

The discovery caused a storm around the world, despite the company releasing a patch that blocked viewing of the scenes and scrubbing them from new versions of the game.