Long story short: Really pissed off with the current Mafia 2 six month long pre-purchase scam that is continuing without any end in sight.

As such, I'm looking for possible English language gaming sites with enough clout that they could help persuade Valve/2K to rectify this situation once and for all (if they publish an article about this) as a result of bad publicity.

Shiny rep points for someone able to point me to a site that then publishes an article about this.

Kotaku.com.

The editors love to talk about Japan. Considering you live there, they may pay attention to you.

I second Kotaku, they seem to have a pretty large readership.

Good luck with this man, I've seen you talk about this a couple of times before and it's fucking awful. Their support staff are usually really arrogant, never bothering to actually trying to help you and just copy/pasting irrelevant prewritten responses.

Another place that might be interested is joystiq. Worth a shot, but I think Kotaku is probably your best bet.

Surely a scam is appropriate for a game about criminals, think of it as an augmented reality marketing scheme

Have you considered writing an opinion piece & researched article yourself since you're the one in the middle of the situation and then shopping it around to various websites for publication? Kotaku does have some guest posts on occasion and I seem to recall that rock paper shotgun have had some too.

Giving someone something that will help reduce their workload and drive publicity is better than just asking them to do it for you, after all people are lazy & will always take the easy way when given the option

From past experience, Kotaku are not interested. I've also tried joystiq.

As for writing an article myself, there's not much I could do research wise now. As a mere consumer, I'm being ignored. So asides from a few old emails from 2K, I've got nothing. Besides that, anything I write on the subject will simply be way too biased and full of hatred -- that's how much it pisses me off.

Apparently, RPS don't accept submissions =/

So any other ideas folks? Or is this just as futile as trying to get an answer from Steam support? *sigh*

RPS may not accept submissions, but they certainly accept article requests. Mail them explaining the situation, they may do their own investigations and article.

While they do not accept submission (in general), they do seem to take a link/hint at a topic:

How to remind RPS on a topic they could report about, including contact mail

As for another nomination, I'd suggest trying your luck with PC gamer (Email: editor@pcgamer.com ), given that both RPS and PC Gamer are directly linked to the Steam news section, I'd consider the two of them to have the most impact.

Edit: *sighs* while I was still gathering links, somebody was faster than me on posting about RPS taking suggestions

I emailed RPS but I don't know, I get the feeling they might like Steam too much to want to write anything about how it's the cause of so many problems elsewhere =/

I'll try PC Gamer tomorrow.

Maybe try pestering them individually on twitter? Richard Cobbett is also a good sort, and he may pay attention (he also writes for PC gamer).

Well, RPS state this on their site: Oh – and if you want a reply, don’t Twitter us or private message us on the forum. Email us. Just like old times.

So I think I won't Twitter-stalk RPS. I've emailed them, if they choose to respond, great. If not, then there's nothing I can really do about it.

As for PCG, I'll email them today...