entertainment-consumers-association posts

It looks like the gaming-oriented consumer trade group the Entertainment Consumers Association is trying to stave off a near mutiny of some of its members who feel the organization is doing some shady things concerning the renewal of membership fees.

It started a few months ago when the ECA offered a new one-year membership for free. Membership includes using ECA's discount offers from various partners including one from Amazon.com. However soon after that free membership offer was given the Amazon.com discount was taken down. Once more, an option to shut off the membership auto-renewal feature via the ECA web site was also taken away with the explanation that the feature wasn't supposed to be there in the first place.

The upshot of all this is that ECA members have to send a physical mail to the ECA headquarters to disable the auto-renew on their membership. Our sister site Joystiq contacted the ECA and got a response from its founder Hal Halpin. He explained that the Amazon.com discount was shut off after "some of the new members found an exploit in one of our partners' promotional codes and spread the word."

As for the regular mail requirement for shutting of the auto-renew membership, Halpin states, " . . . due to a small but active number of members who were repeatedly joining, leaving and re-joining the organization – in an effort to exploit our member benefits and unduly take advantage of our partners' generous offers – we would require a mailed letter, as per our membership agreement." While we certainly understand the need to stop so-called members who are joining just to exploit discount deals, we do feel that there are regular and upstanding ECA members that should have the option of cutting off their membership fee quickly without having to resort to mailing such a request to the group's offices.

The creator of one of the most interesting gaming web sites around is now moving on to other projects. Dennis McCauley, the founder and editor-in-chief of the GamePolitics.com web site, announced this week he is leaving the site and indeed leaving journalism entirely. He has not announced what he will be doing next.

McCauley founded GamePolitics.com in 2005 and the site been at the forefront of covering how the game industry has interacted with the law and lawmakers. It has been the first to break major news events in that area such as the "Hot Coffee" mini-game discovery in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and how that mini-game lead to lawmakers asking for more rules regulating the game industry. It also covered the fall of one of the industry's biggest critics in Jack Thompson when he lost his Flordia law license.

GamePolitics.com is owned by the Entertainment Consumers Association and that group has already announced that former GameDaily editor-in-chief Pete Gallagher will be taking over McCauley's duties. We wish him well in his future endeavors.