The gaming industry is bombarded with many legal issues
regarding Piracy, Copyright and Game Content that affects the Developers,
Publishers and most importantly us, the consumers.
Earlier on this year, Bethesda criticised Notch (Creator of
Minecraft) on the title for his new game he is working on, ‘Scrolls’. Bethesda
were more than unhappy about the choice of name as their highest grossing game
series, ‘The Elder Scrolls’ with its latest release of ‘Skyrim’ (November 11th
2011). Notch proposed to ‘throw down like gentlemen’ on Quake 3 to settle the
matter yet Bethesda were reluctant to comply with the offer. The court case
proceeded and the only outcome was that Notch could only use the name ‘Scrolls’
on the first game and that he would have to use an alternative name if he were
to then release a sequel. I’m sure that Notch wouldn’t have been affected by
this outcome but the prices for his lawyers might have been a little steep.
Another issue with Law in the gaming industry are the amount
of redundancies that occur with new and upcoming developers. A classic example
of this would be 38 studios, founded by curt ‘bloody sock’ schilling in 2006.
38 studios were a small games industry founded by a professional baseball player,
Hence the nickname ‘bloody sock’ this nickname came from a match where he was
about to hit a ball that could potentially give him and his team the upper hand
of the game yet blood could be seen coming from his ankle by the crowd just
above his sock. This information not needed but still, nice to know I guess.
Schilling although being extremely athletic and sporty extremely enjoyed his
MMO and RPG games. With him being a professional baseball star, he had a fair
bit of money that he wanted to use to start a games development studio and was
then encouraged by friends to do so. He invested quite a lot of money into this
business with the intention of getting big in the industry. 38 were then
offered $75 million by the state of Rhode Island to move their studios over to
Rhode Island to create 450 jobs in the area and to start developing the
projects that the team had proposed. Schilling and the team leaped at the offer
because frankly, who wouldn’t if they were in this situation. After shortly
accepting this offer and moving their team and the offices over to Rhode Island,
they began working on 2 projects, An MMO called Copernicus and an RPG, Kingdom
of Amulur…At the same time. This from day one was not also a bad idea, but an
idea that would then put the whole studios into an extremely dangerous
position. As weeks went on, the MMO was eating away at the resources and money
that 38 studios had while the RPG was using significantly less. This ended, as
you can imagine, not very well as the MMO wasn’t the big success that the team
were hoping for. This meant that they did not have enough profit from selling
the game to pay for the staff’s wages or any other costs that were needed.
Disastrous. 
Another incident In the early days of 2011 had Sony taking
legal action against the hackers that published security codes for the
PlayStation 3 online.( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12171423).
The Hacking group named themselves ‘failOverflow’ and gained knowledge about
the security codes that are written/signed to games to prove that they are
genuine copies. By knowing this code, many people could potentially write this
code to games they had torrented from the internet thus making piracy a large
threat to the gross that Sony and its developers have coming in.
As this would cause a problem, the hackers were searched for
throughout the internet and their website was closed down overnight with a
message saying ‘Sony sued us’ and a brief message about the current
circumstances. Sony then took legal action on the hackers and the main culprit
for the damage he had done. Mr Hotz was requested to be issued a restraining
order from Sony that banned him from further hacking and the distribution of
the software that allowed people to hack the PlayStation.
As You Can Obviously See, Legal Issues are a massive part of
the gaming industry and affect us as an individual and a community as the
hacking scandal prevented all PSN users to be blocked from using the services
for around a week or so. Other issues solely affecting the games that are made
and sold to us and the content games have inside them.
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