Ask a Game Dev

There are certain things that studios and companies can ask us not to do but have a real hard time preventing, especially if the company is going through a death spiral process. Keeping a personal copy of stuff I worked on, especially in an age of remote work, is one of those really hard-to-prevent things. If the company or studio is going under, almost everyone is losing their jobs and the motivation to maintain operational security is very low. Nobody in security cares when their main priority suddenly shifts to finding a new job. In these situations, leaked stuff happens a lot more often since there's little motivation for enforcement.

It's much harder for workers who are let go from a company that remains alive, since breaking NDA would result in being liable for a bunch of damages. However, if I don't disclose anything and just keep stuff private, the studio cares a lot less about whether I have those files. They don't really do much forensic analysis of the workstations of former employees, they mostly just wipe them clean in order to protect the company from potential liabilities from accidentally finding left-behind personal files of the former workers.

The thing about old game projects (especially for cancelled games) is that there's really only so long that the old stuff is even viable. The inevitable passing of time will decay any knowledge of the project and its workflow. If we release information and development stuff about games that were cancelled, say, two console generations ago, it is unlikely that the current IP holders and leadership would be super angry about it because so much time has passed. This is considerably different from releasing information about a game that was cancelled this year, where things are still raw and legal action is still a very legitimate threat.

The main benefit to holding on to old projects is primarily for personal education. There's a lot to be learned if one can go back and study the way things worked on an old project. How did they set things up and why? How can I learn what decisions my seniors and leads made, and why did they make those decisions? How did they solve these problems? Can I use those same techniques? There might be some element of internet influencer points if old stuff gets released to the public, but that typically gets glossed over the way trivia is treated. In my opinion, the real value in old project assets is in the educational content it can provide.

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Standard disclaimer - I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. I am only a game dev speaking from my experience as a game dev about a hypothetical situation.

Even if the developer and publisher have gone out of business, somebody probably still owns the rights to the game. If you remake an existing game using their assets and/or copyrighted material, you are still using somebody else's IP without the owner's permission and that's illegal. It does not matter whether you charge for it or not, you are still potentially causing damage to someone else's property. The recent hullabaloo about AI-generated porn of Taylor Swift wasn't a big deal because someone charged for it, it was because someone made and distributed it without her permission.

If you want to remake a favorite game, my advice is always to make a spiritual successor to that game - make the new game feel and play like the old game as much as you want, but don't use the old characters/story/world/etc. Somebody owns those and that owner would be fully within their rights to stop you if you use them... but they can't do a thing if you don't use them. Make your own thing. It's a lot better for all around - players will actually be able to play your game, you'll be able to showcase your game, and you can choose either to sell it to or use it to get hired by paying game studios/publishers.

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I agree that making an effort to change the copyright laws is very hard. I agree that it has a very small chance of success. However, very small is still a non-zero chance of success - it is just very small. If enough voters push their representatives to make legal changes, laws can be made. Doing things like posting angrily on the internet has a success chance of zero. Talk is cheap. Change is hard to effect. If I want to effect change, it only makes sense to put effort into the thing that has a chance of succeeding. If you can think of an action that has a higher chance of success than lobbying to change the laws, please share. I would be happy to participate.

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Licensors want to maintain control of their intellectual property. Most of the time, they grant a reasonable temporary use of the license because they want to re-evaluate how things are going from time to time and decide whether to renew the license or not. For old games from 10-20 years ago, the brand owner may not want their brand associated with that game anymore. Most owners are very protective of their intellectual property because it holds value and it's what pays their bills. Beyond that, the vast majority of game sales happen within the duration of the first license, so it really isn't worth it to either the publisher or the licensor to think about the handful of player collectors who are looking to buy a decade-old licensed game. If there are enough people who want to buy those old games, the publisher will usually reach out to the licensor to see if a remake/remaster is reasonable. If an agreement can be reached, the remaster goes forward.

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As with most things, it's good to take the time to understand the nuance of what was said. The Ubisoft person doing the speaking was Philippe Tremblay and he is Director of Subscriptions at Ubisoft. In [the article], he was specifically talking about the mental shift that needs to happen in order for a subscription business model in games to really take hold, because game subscription services are really still in their early stages. Realistically speaking, subscriptions have one of two possible futures - an eventual plateau where subscriptions reach sustainability and equilibrium or an eventual crash because they couldn't.

Look at digital music streaming services like Spotify. They have largely reached their plateau as a massive chunk of the music market. There are still people who buy physical albums, but they are in the minority. The majority of music consumers tend to listen to their music via streaming services and have gotten used to not owning their music. This is one possible future for video games.

Let's contrast this with the current state of movie and tv streaming services. There's a huge number of streaming customers, but there are still strong physical media sales because the streaming services can't necessarily keep the shows and films the people want due to licensing issues. When this kind of volatility in the availability of the product is commonplace, it upsets the user base and puts them off of staying as subscribers. This is another possible future for video games.

As for buying games digitally and "owning" them... well, not really? Like... we've known for ages that end of service for live games is the end of the road, barring player-run grey shards and the like. There are many MMOG, MOBA, looter shooter, mobile, etc. games that have been shut down permanently. Some kinds of games are inherently ownable and some are not.

As player, it is largely up to us to decide what kind of games we want to support. Playing with a regular group of friends in a live service game is a huge amount of fun but absolutely not conducive to owning the game. Playing a single-player game by myself at my leisure is much more conducive to ownership, but I lose out on content updates and the camaraderie of playing with friends. It is my belief that we should all support the things we value. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

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It depends a lot on the game and the music. There's a sliding scale of the importance of licensed music ranging from being core to the game on one end all the way to being a marketing flex that is otherwise unnecessary for the game itself on the other. Licensed music was one of the core elements that made Guitar Hero work. Licensed music added a huge amount of ambience to a game like GTA Vice City.

Games that use licensed music as a marketing flex types tend to be one of two categories - very large mainstream large franchises (e.g. Madden, Call of Duty, etc.) or big-budget games that are aiming to establish such a franchise. Licensed music is trying to appeal to the broadest audience possible by using widely-recognized artists. Call of Duty has used Eminem's music four separate times to promote their games (including one track 'Survival' that debuted with CoD: Ghosts) but the music generally has little to do with the game or the setting at all aside from just being cool. It works to grab attention, but yeah - it's expensive and can make things difficult later after the license expires.

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I believe that Valve has determined they are ready and able to deflect any (current) legal liabilities onto an offending game's developers and off of themselves. Most of these devs are likely going to be similar to the AI-supported youtube content farms that regularly violate copyright but make money by having hundreds of channels all regurgitating videos such that it becomes difficult to copyright strike them all.

I also think that this decision will result in a wave of AI-supported shovelware and asset flips. Think about all of the RPGMaker games and Unity-type asset flips that are pervasive on Steam and just imagine more of those with AI-generated assets and such. I don't think the vast majority of these games will be any good, but they will certainly be plentiful since there's a much lower bar to make them.

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People representing the platform (Epic, Steam, GamePass, etc.) choose games they want to give away and they reach out to the company handling the game's distribution (the game's publisher or studio). If the publisher/studio is amenable, the platform then sets up a deal with the game publisher/studio to "give" the game away.

This translates to a contract between the two parties. The platform typically agrees to terms like when the giveaway will occur, how long the game will be available, that the platform will pay the publisher/studio some agreed-upon amount per player who plays/claims the game, and usually a guaranteed minimum total payout to provide assurance to the publisher/studio that the deal will be worthwhile.

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I think it would help to provide a little more context as to what is going on.

Way back in 2004, a game called KOTOR 2 shipped and was played by a lot of players. Many players did not like the ending, but the game had been in development for less than a year and Obsidian were on the hook to ship the game by the deadline. The game was regarded by many players as a flawed gem.

Years later, modders would discover a whole bunch of unfinished endgame content in [KOTOR 2's original files]. Some of them collaborated to unlock, fill out, debug, and finish that content and restore it. This was released for the PC as an unofficial fan mod called The Sith Lords Restored Content Modification in 2009 and has had several updates since.

In 2015 Aspyr Media, a smaller game publisher and developer, obtained the rights to port old Bioware games and began releasing titles like KOTOR, KOTOR 2, and Jade Empire to platforms like iOS, Linux, and Steam. It was around this time that Aspyr began working with the mod team responsible for the Restored Content Mod mentioned above, all in hopes of bringing the mod to these other platforms. The DLC was never really Aspyr's work, it was the mod team working with Aspyr to bring that content to Aspyr's Switch port of KOTOR 2. Eight years later, Aspyr announced that things had fallen through and the Restored Content DLC was cancelled.

It sounds like what happened was that something essential fell apart along the way and there was really no way to complete the work in a timely and legal fashion. One of the original modders posted to reddit after the announcement was made and said "Aspyr did nothing wrong. Quote me on that. Shame it ended the way it did... I have nothing but good things to say about Aspyr and our cooperation over the past eight years". I suspect that, had the DLC been completable within reasonable circumstances, they would have done so. But there's a lot of potential issues that could have stopped them - the license may have expired, it may have been a Nintendo certification thing, the mod team could have fallen apart, there could have been some major legal liability that came to light, it could be the financial trouble currently hitting Embracer Group (Aspyr's owner as of 2001), or any of a number of things. The only people who know for sure are the mod team and Aspyr. I suspect they are all under NDA, so I doubt they will be telling.

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Voice actors get the lines and direction for all scenes they are part of, as well as any barks they will be doing (e.g. attacking noises, taking damage, attack call-outs, etc.). What they say during interviews is mostly their speculation based on what parts they've seen of the scripts. The voice actors usually perform opposite a stand-in to speak the other lines. The more scenes they get, the more they can piece together what the game is about. This is primarily because VAs have historically been a big source of leaks and spoilers in the past (which is why one of the publisher demands during the last voice actor strike was harsher enforcement of NDAs). Several better-known voice actors do voice work for many, many games so they will often just do it with minimal preparation. since they've got so many to work through.

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The purpose of IP law is to protect the creators of intellectual property. Without IP law protections, there is little to stop those with more money/resources from simply taking whatever good ideas from their creators and making their own version of the product without ever paying the original creator or giving them any credit for coming up with the idea.

IP law also protects creators' creative control over their own creations. Matt Furie, creator of Pepe the Frog, is using those laws in order to stop white supremacists from using his IP in their books and products. If IP laws were to be abolished, anyone would be free to use any IP for anything, including people whose ideals you probably hate.

A generally good rule of thumb is to consider what the proposed legal change is and how the worst people in the world could take advantage of that change if they were the ones utilizing it. We can't really legislate intent, only action. If you're ok with the results in the worst case scenario, by all means lobby for such change within the legal system.

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I've written about the [preservation of games] in the past. The 87% figure doesn't really surprise me. I've said it before, the main issue is a misalignment of incentives. The loss of these games is tragic, but there is currently little incentive for any of these publishers to do something about it.

Game publishers have a huge amount of money invested in their intellectual property. It holds value. They can potentially re-release these games, sell or license the rights, or any of a number of other options. Giving that away comes at the cost of all of those other options and gains them nothing except the fleeting good will of players who will happily rake them over the coals when the next set of patch notes get released. Corporations cannot give something of value away out of the goodness of their hearts, they are legally bound to operate in the shareholders' best (financial) interests.

In order to get the publishers on board, they need a good incentive to do so, something that they can present to their shareholders to say "this will be provably better for the company than sitting on the rights to these old games" and justify giving up the value. If, for example, game publishers could obtain a significant tax writeoff for issuing a license for their old games to accredited archives and museums, they would have a reason to help out with the preservation of those games. Such a thing would require a coordinated lobbying effort by the publishers and the voters, but it is within the realm of possibility. I believe that trying to force them to give up their intellectual property is a losing proposition, since they will absolutely fight it every step of the way.

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We're not thinking about AI too much - it's too far away on the horizon to seriously consider while we're busy focusing on getting the game into alpha, beta, and doing our cert submission prep. Some of the more senior leadership have talked about it in that kind of long-term planning sort of way and there's been some preliminary evaluation on that front, but the general attitude from my studio leadership (and the leadership of the franchise I'm currently working on) is that AI is interesting but the potential legal pitfalls from using AI trained on large internet-scraped data sets for things like asset generation have yet to be addressed... and we're far too well-known and visible a franchise to risk that kind of legal trouble knowingly.

Our primary goal in evaluating AI as a development tool is for the same reason we develop tools and automated assistance to help artists create assets - anything that helps automate the annoying and busy work that artists have to do frees up more dev time for them to do the creative stuff that we want them to do. Instead of having to create normal and spec maps by hand, maybe we can automate and improve the process so that the artists can spend their time creating more cool assets and not have to handle the fiddly busy work. If an AI can help by pre-filling in values and setting things up for them to review and adjust, that's a lot faster than having to do it by hand. A large portion of our tool engineering is targeted at those kinds of problems.

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The point of passing certification is that the first party (i.e. Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo) will grant the game publisher a license to use their IP in a limited capacity to sell the game. This license allows the publishers to use things in advertising like the console logos, images of the consoles, trademarks such as the words "Playstation" or "Xbox" or "Switch" and related accessories (e.g. "Joycon", "Sixaxis", "Kinect", etc.). Without the license from the console makers to use these elements, any means of advertisement using them would be copyright or trademark infringement and subject to takedown notices, cease and desist letters, and even lawsuits.

Further, if anyone attempts to bypass the console manufacturers on the sales end, it is likely that the console manufacturers would retaliate by yanking any developer accounts and permabanning any console dev kits from connecting to the console development network. It would theoretically be possible to get around blacklisted developer accounts by reverse engineering everything, but the game still wouldn't work with the PSN, XBL, or Nintendo Online.

It is possible to sell an unlicensed game (and some have done it in the past to a limited extent), but it is quite difficult to do so to any realistic degree without mentioning the name of the console the game runs on, console developer accounts and hardware development kits to build the game on, or the ability for players to connect to the console's online network (and thus inaccessible features like achievements, multiplayer, patching, digital distribution, etc.).

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Yes. Legally speaking, it actually doesn't matter whether you make money or not, copyright infringement is still copyright infringement even if the infringer doesn't make a dime off of it. The owner of the IP is within their rights to choose what is and isn't allowed with their property.

Let's use a somewhat extreme example. Each of us owns the copyright to our own likeness. No one can legally use my likeness without my permission. No one has the right to make content of me without my permission. I can choose to license my likeness out for use in a video game or a movie or something and I can set the terms and conditions those creators must adhere to in order to retain my permission to use my likeness. It is up to my discretion who gets to use my face, voice, and so on.

Now imagine that somebody decided to take my likeness and deepfake me into pornographic content or white supremacist propaganda or something equally heinous, and then distribute it on the internet without my permission. As long as these people aren't making any money off of it, should this behavior be allowed? In such a situation, even though no money is changing hands, my likeness would still be associated with things I do not want, nor did I ever give permission to. What if they depicted me as doing things deeply against my religious beliefs? What if they depicted me encouraging or participating in behavior that goes against everything I believe in? I would say no, this shouldn't be allowed.

This sense of ownership and value extends to the works I create and own. When copyright is infringed, that value is potentially affected. I believe that the current intellectual property system, as it exists, is far from perfect - it is absolutely flawed. But I don't think the solution is to throw it out completely, because I think that I should be able to own my ideas, creations, and likeness. I think that I should have a say in who gets to use my ideas.

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Sometimes they do! Back when licensed movie games were a thing, I worked on one. The studio I was working for was actually developing two different licensed movie tie-in games at the time and the dev team relationships with the different movie studios was like night and day.

Our movie studio treated us very well - we got to scan the actors' faces and costumes, record actor voice lines, obtain an advanced copy of the movie script (that was kept under lock and key and had to be signed out by the creative director for us to read it), get set photos for reference, and even invited us out to the private studio theater for a screening of the movie before it premiered in theaters. I have to admit, I've never been in a movie theater that nice ever since. The acoustics in that room were amazing.

In contrast, I heard that the other movie studio was quite difficult to work with. According to studio gossip, the other movie studio refused to give plot details of the film, nitpicked a lot of the development process, refused to let them use requested characters, and generally offered few explanations or real help. I felt a great deal of sympathy for the other dev team.

As you may have guessed, it really depends on the licensor. Sometimes they are extremely helpful and open to collaboration, and sometimes they are guarded and wary. The licensors are not monolithic - the bigger ones have entire licensing departments to handle these kind of situations, and the brand managers and licensors are as different as people can be different.

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For those who weren't paying attention, Hasbro (owners of Dungeons & Dragons) looked at D&D as a franchise whole and decided that it was under-monetized. This is understandable - the IP is one of the most popular and well-known in the world. D&D is essentially synonymous with tabletop gaming (or even gaming in general); people all over the world have heard of it even if they've never played it. There have been enormous multi-million dollar franchises that have spun out from D&D like Critical Role. Hasbro saw all of that success, ostensibly built in no small part on their own contributions to the space, and asked themselves "Why aren't we getting more from this thing we built?" Obviously the creators, marketers, influencers, etc. who built their stuff on top of D&D have a huge part in all of this, but Hasbro doesn't get anything from them (including the huge franchises).

All of this was built on the original OGL - the Open Gaming License - which granted users the rights to use the basic rules of D&D along with descriptions of basic spells, monster stat blocks, equipment, tables for those rules, etc. without needing to pay Hasbro anything. Hasbro decided to try to get their piece of this market by changing the license, including royalties for companies earning more than $750,000 USD per year from the licensed material. The language of the new license, however, heavily favored Hasbro legally, such as applying retroactively, allowing Hasbro to change the terms at will, granting Hasbro a permanent license to use anything created with the new OGL, and so on. There has been, and likely will be, a lot of legal arguments over those details. I am not a lawyer so I will defer to those with legally trained minds.

My general thoughts on this are from the perspective of a designer who's worked on a game that's been live for a long time. I don't think that it's unreasonable for the creators and publishers of the game to want royalties from companies making millions each year from their work. However, I think that Hasbro took a very bad approach to this. If this had been their approach to the OGL from the beginning, it would not have made any waves whatsoever. There wouldn't have been anything to compare it against, so players would have simply accepted it.

When something in a game has already been live for a long time, any kind of changes will inherently have a negative value for the players by default - they're used to the old way, so any changes make the new way annoying to have to learn. Making changes needs to be a value add for the players - they need to see why the new changes are good for them. This is generally where I think Hasbro's approach has fallen short - the new license is better for Hasbro, but it's not better for anyone else. If they had wanted the players to be better about it, they should have done more to make it better for the D&D players and content creators - maybe more permissible licensing to allow use of official settings/characters/monsters/etc. or a co-publishing structure to assist content creators create their own official content and get it published. If Hasbro doesn't offer something of value for the users to consider in exchange for the proposed changes, it's obvious that the users would disapprove.

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