When you"re a small business and you overlook a detail, it often goes unnoticed. When you"re a multimillion or multibillion dollar business, it opens up the opportunity for someone to make you look foolish.
Game developer/publisher Ubisoft and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft are both feeling the sting of that lesson these days as the failure to purchase a URL prominently displayed in one of the Xbox"s flagship titles this holiday season has turned the game into an inadvertent advertisement for a Web site featuring hard core pornography.
"Rainbow Six 3" is the latest in UbiSoft"s popular series. For the holiday season, the game was exclusive to the Xbox platform, but a PlayStation 2 version is due on store shelves soon. As you would expect from a title based on a best-selling Tom Clancy novel, it specializes in detail, accurately reflecting the design and effects of the latest military technology. In focusing so closely on the game elements, though, the company forgot to cover itself in the real world.