Hey everyone,
No one is more frustrated by a story being wrong on Kotaku than those of us who work at Kotaku. There's no long-term positive for us if we present a long story cited to anonymous sources that then is refuted by the CEO of the company whose game we wrote about.
I'm frustrated that, after giving Square-Enix three days to comment, they couldn't provide an answer as clear as the one their CEO did on Twitter today. If we thought our sources had burned us and lied to us, we just might out them, but that's not the case here. What is the case is that this situation always was murky and the details of our story explain that. Some questions about the condition and status of this game remain, obviously. For all we know, it still has been transformed into something other than what was initially announced.
At the end of the day, of course, we want you to be able to read a Kotaku story and trust that the reporting is accurate. We want any rumor we run to turn out to be true. In this case we tried for several days to get better details and official confirmation. We didn't start this from nothing. We started this from some talk from sources who have an inside track. We will continue to pursue these kinds of stories.
If you see doubt expressed within one of our rumor stories, then you can assume the story may turn out to be off in some way. It is on us to be clear about how things might be wrong. And, as in some other anonymously-sourced stories (as in most of our next-gen hardware stories), the lack of many or any qualifications should signal to you about how much more confident we are in those.
We won't always get everything right. But we will continue to be clear as can be about what we know and what we don't know.
Thanks for keeping up with our site and taking the work we do seriously.