Activision made a bit of an oopsy when sending out update emails. Rather than sending emails privately, they addressed the email to all recipients in the “to:” field, revealing the email addresses of all recipients. Quite a few people aren’t happy about that.


By Benjamin Buday, Editor-in-Chief


Activision has sent an update regarding the status of the Wii Guitar Hero III disc replacement program to all inquiring parties.

“We wanted to provide you with an update regarding the status of the Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Wii replacement discs. The game has been approved by Nintendo and is currently in manufacturing. We expect to have the replacement discs available in February. Once we have the discs, we will contact you and then proactively send you a prepaid return envelop with a game exchange claim form. You should return the completed form with your current copy of the game. Once we receive a completed claim form and game, we will send you the replacement disc. We thank you for your patience and support.”

But another story has surfaced: when they sent these emails out, rather than blasting emails to each person privately or using the BCC field, they sent the message to all recipients by listing them in the “to:” field. Essentially, if you signed up for this program, everyone else now knows your screen name. And for some, this can be a problem with spamming issues.

I received the email at my “Benjamin@megazinemedia.com” address along with 91 other recipients with last names starting with A and B. So these people know my email address now. I don’t care, but quite a few of them do — within minutes of the initial email, recipients began emailing the entire recipient group in a forum-esque manner complaining about the invasion of privacy.

So anyway, two stories. For those who want to know what’s up with your disc replacement, Activision thinks this will pacify you and your curiosity about when this program will actually start (note: this email didn’t specify anything new), and for those who like to make big deals out of nothing, Activision apparently offended a lot of people with an unprofessional email blast.

As always, I’ll keep you in the know when more information, pertinent or less so, becomes available.

Benjamin can be reached at Benjamin@megazinemedia.com.