We all make mistakes. However, not everyone makes mistakes whilst working for an online publication, with those mistakes then inevitably spreading across the Internet like wildfire, forcing people to involuntarily cringe so much that it feels as though their skin is turning inside out. This is unfortunately the predicament that VG247 editor Matt Martin finds himself in today, after he issued an apology for a preview the site published for the upcoming Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End… with the writer of the piece failing to realize that they were actually playing the Uncharted 2 HD remaster.
To their credit, VG247 have owned up to the mistake, posting an apology on their website, which reads:
“We’d like to apologise to Naughty Dog for a massive mistake we published last month.
“On September 30 we published an article titled “Is Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End too formulaic?” based on what we thought was a hands-on session with Uncharted 4 at the Tokyo Game Show.
“We didn’t realise it at the time; what we’d played wasn’t Uncharted 4, but the remastered Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, from the recently released Uncharted Collection. We were not aware of this until after the article went live.”
The apology, penned by Martin, goes on to state that after Sony had informed them of the mistake the preview was immediately taken down, with the editor concluding: “The buck stops with the editor of the site, so I’m the one apologising. I should have done it sooner. I am genuinely sorry for this mistake, the misrepresentation of the game and the upset this has caused the development team.”
Martin states that the preview was conducted at the Tokyo Game Show, therefore meaning that the majority of the signage wasn’t in English, but goes on to say that this doesn’t excuse that the preview was posted without adequate fact-checking.
While this will have been a big blow to the credibility of the site, and the tone of the now-removed piece certainly doesn’t help its chances thanks to the writer branding themselves an “Uncharted veteran,” it’s commendable that Martin and the rest of the team at VG247 have owned up to their mistake and have apologized for misrepresenting the upcoming game. Conventions such as TGS are stressful environments that are not exactly conducive to playing video games, and the handful of journalists sent out by each publication will inevitably not be familiar with every game series that they are asked to report upon. While that does not validate the mistake made by VG247, it shows that they are willing to admit when they have supplied their readers with false information, even though staying quiet about it likely would have been easier for them.
[Via VG247]
