The video game industry: Legal issues

Legal issues within the games industry

There are two main types of legal issues that affect the games industry, industry practices and consumer practices. Industry practices are problems relating or caused by the industry itself like working conditions and contracts. Where as consumer practice are legal issues involving the consumer, the people that play the games, these are things like jail breaking and pirating games.

The games industry has intellectually property laws; these are a form of industry practice. Intellectually properties are laws or contracts set in place to guard your work and your ideas. The most common is copyright laws, these are laws set in place to protect your work being copied. This however does not protect your ideas or even the idea behind the work you have copyrighted. But it does stop people from stealing your work or manipulating it and claiming it as your own. A good example of this was in 2011 Bethesda tried to sue Mojang, as Mojang planed to name their second game “scrolls” Bethesda saw this as copyright infringement as they believed they owned the name scrolls, from there game series the elder scrolls. This was taken too court and the judge decided that Mojang could use the name scrolls, but only once. As making a series called scrolls would be more like the elder scroll series. Another example of copyrighting is in august 2012 EA’s maxis put forward a lawsuit against Zynga, claiming there facebook game “the Ville” was a rip off of EA’s facebook game “sim social”. This has yet to be stetted but will be in court.

EA's sim social

Zynga's the ville

Another form of industry practice is the contracts with the games developers. A games developer will have contracts will all employees as well as with other companies. There are trade secret contracts with game companies to prevent employees from sharing company secrets with anyone, especially other companies. If these laws are broken then the company has the right to sue the individual. An example of this is Jason West and Vincent Zampella who where fired from infinity war, as they were found to be in contact with EA, Activision main competitor, this lead to all of infinity ward’s staff leaving and making Respawn entertainment. There can also be contracts between games companies or even between games companies and other unrelated companies. Often a games development industry will be provided money by another company to produce a game. An example of this was when 38 studios were given $75 million by the state of Rhode Island to move there and create 450 jobs for the new state. To try and repay the money 38 studios started working on 2 separate games, and rpg called kingdom on Amalur and a mmo named Copernicus, they hoped that with the money from kingdom on Amalur they could pay Rhode island and fund there next game, however kingdom of Amalur failed and didn’t produce enough money and so the contract failed and the company went bankrupt. This could have been avoided if the company had focused on one game, they could have made kingdom of Amalur much better, meaning more people would buy it, meaning 38 studios would have money to fund there next game, also this would have meant we gamers would have a much better rpg to play.

Working condition in the games industry is another form of industry practices. Like all industry there are laws and guidelines as to how the games industry should be ran. Restricting the amount of hours required to work, the conditions of the working environment and how the employ should be treated. These restrictions don’t just help the employees they also help the company. For example Team bondi were the team originally working on L.A noir, but because of the work conditions the game was taken over by Rockstar in 2006, meaning the game was in development for 7 years, way long then expected. Team bondi’s had many working condition problems, firstly they didn’t treat employees well, they over worked them, having them work 6-7 days a week, and they would often fire employees for not keeping deadlines that were impossible to keep, meaning the staffing changed very often, making it hard for the company to finish the game together. They also went way to much over the budget, the leaders were always coming up with new ideas and redesigning parts of the story meaning they paid to make a lot of content that was unneeded, leading too dept very fast, and so have to sell to Rockstar. These things could have been avoided if the leaders stopped treating the game as their own play thing and let the workers create something that would sell. Also the employees should have spoken out sooner, as soon as they were under presser to give up their weekends at risk of being fired. This would have meant that the matter would have been settled, perhaps in court. This could have meant the scrapping of the game at worst, or at best the project leaders would have been forced to follow the rules, meaning less people would have been fire. This would have meant the game wouldn’t have taken 7 years, as the same people would have been able to work on it and we as consumers would have a much better game to play.

One of the biggest forms of consumer practices in the games industry is piracy. Piracy is a massive problem for games, especially for pc games. It is all to easy to pirate a game on the pc, and so often developers do not receive anywhere near how much money they should for a game Many developers have stopped releasing games on the pc because they know their game will be pirated. It takes money to format a game to a different platform, in a way you need to produce the game several time, once for every consol, this takes up a lot of money and so many developers don’t format their games for pc as they know they many not even make enough money out of it to break even with making it. Often however people feel there is a need to prate a game, if that game is very old and impossible to buy anywhere. The games industry often encourages this, as they want there old games to be played. Companies like steam can help with this, as they have many old games that are hard to access anymore, that you can buy cheaply which will still help the industry. Piracy is the reason the legislation laws SOPA (stop online piracy act) and PIPA (protect IP Act) where considered. The idea of these bills where to make it harder for pirated material to be spread through the internet. This was a fairly good idea, as it would stop piracy, meaning no games could be pirated and so would have to be brought raising the amount of money the games industry would make. However this would mean no one could copy anything without permission, we wouldn’t be able to upload any videos on things like youtube, with game footage in, and if we did youtube would have to be shut down, and so evidently the bill would affect the internet. So for that reason the bills weren’t passed.

Another consumer practice is jail breaking. This is where you modify the software of a machine giving greater control of it. The original idea was to unlock the machine in order to make and add your own application, making it more personal, like making the operating system on a ps3 Linux, which was originally promised. So many people have jail broke there Ps3 to run on Linux, which they believe and argue is alright as ps3 originally aloud it. However some people use jail breaking to copy games. Things like the r4 for the Nintendo DS which were originally for making your own programs are now are mainly used for copyrighting games, which affects the games industry. As r4s can store thousands of games, meaning the developers do not receive the money they should for your purchasing that game, meaning to it hard for a games company to fund there next game.