[citation][nom]Smochina[/nom]what you still don't understand, is that Blizzard did not release this for the press. It's on their forums for the people that play the game. Not for idiot journalists who don't understand what a game is in the first place.[/citation]
You should also realize that if Blizzard only tries to market StarCraft II to those loyal fans that have been camping their forums daily, then the game is bound to fail. The problem here is that for the vast majority of the gaming world that DOESN'T make up the hardcore Blizzard fandom, they rely on sources vastly more mainstream than forums to get their news. Since, IIRC, Blizzard's forums require you submit proof you already own a copy of a Blizzard game to join, that makes it not a very good source for those who want to learn things about a game before potentially buying it.
Not reaching out to correct media mistakes is one of the oldest PR screw-ups in the book. It doesn't matter if some will know that the rumors are false: what matters is that for those on the outside, they'll take them as true, and Blizzard did a poor job of stepping in to stop this from happening. It's something they should've fired their head of PR over. Undoubtedly at least some people were scared away from buying a copy of the game (or at least buying it so soon) due to all the controversy heard. This is a sensitive subject that a company needs to appear clear and decisive on... And Blizzard let things appear far more cloudy than that.
[citation][nom]Smochina[/nom]But, hey, an intellectual being like yourself, who thrusts journalists no matter what, what can I say. And above all, morons at tomshardware who have no clue about anything in the first place. Like the NASA discovery from which the idiots understood it was something about alien life forms found on Earth, yeah, they changed the title now, but we all saw it. So, why in the hell would I trust anything journalists say?[/citation]
You'd trust (or "thrust" I suppose) journalists because they're not supposed to have a conflict of interest. It's a well-known fact that a company will lie if necessary to make themselves look good in any situation. An example that pops to mind was the Xbox 360's infamous RROD scandal: for months, Microsoft denied it, and claimed it was all due to user mishandling; they knew they were lying, but they were hoping they could get away with it.
For those loyal fans that only listened to Microsoft, that's the only story they would've heard until they changed their tune... And hence they would've been taken entirely by surprise by it. Similar tales go for countless other product-makers. A strong parallel comes with the iPhone 4: Apple blaming users for their own design failures, before finally acknowledging the problem.
In both cases, those that trusted the media over the corporation with a vested interest in making themselves look good knew what was really happening far before the loyal fans had the news broken to them. So it's no surprise that the same logic gets applied here: Activision-Blizzard has a vested interest in making sure they look good, even if Bobby Kotick seems to be very good at doing the opposite. Hence, it's logical to not put them above telling some white lies.
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