Ark: Survival Mod That Replaces Dinos With Pokemon DMCA'd, Possibly By Another Rival Modding Group

from the strategic-censorship dept

This story is a rather fast-moving, so let's dig in. Ark: Survival is a survival game in which you hunt dinosaurs. Being a PC game, there is a fairly healthy modding community working with the game to expand it, make slight alterations to it, and even inject other instances of pop culture into it. Case in point is the Pokemon Evolved mod, which replaces the dinos that are to be hunted with, you guessed it, pokemon. As you probably also have already guessed, the mod was hit with a DMCA notice and was briefly taken out of the Steam Workshop.

You would be forgiven at this point if you immediately assumed that it was the folks at either Nintendo or The Pokemon Company, both of which have been noticed policing the Pokemon IP aggressively. It was therefore head scratching that much of the reporting was peppered with caution over assigning blame for the DMCA, such as was the case in the original PC Gamer post linked above.

We're not sure yet who issued the DMCA notice—we've inquired and will let you know when we hear back, but it could definitely spell trouble for the mod, especially since modder 'Mystic Academy' admits the models and animations used in the mod were imported directly from Pokémon X/Y rather than recreated from scratch. The modder only made changes to ensure the models worked in-game.

Anyone familiar with how the Pokemon property has been protected in the past no doubt saw these caveats as superfluous hand-wringing. Turns out they were not, however. The developer of the mod, Mystic Academy, began making a great deal of noise about the DMCA actually coming from a rival modding group that was also releasing a mod for the game to inject Pokemon into it. That accusation appears to now be the accepted reality, with the DMCA being rescinded...

The DMCA notice has apparently been lifted, and no longer appears on the mod's page in the Steam Workshop.

...and Mystic Academy having a bit of fun at the accused DMCAer, a modder going by "Cheese", who does indeed have a rival mod called ARKmon WIP.

Now, the DMCA process is supposed to be utilized by rights-holders to protect their own intellectual property. DMCA notices initiated with service providers typically (always?) include language such as the following example from Vimeo:

A statement by you UNDER PENALTY OF PERJURY that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf.

The "penalty of perjury" portion sounds great, warning against issuing DMCA notices over intellectual property not owned by the issuer, except the provision is so rarely enforced as to render it mere legal smegma. Too often the DMCA process is abused in this way, acting as a weapon against rivals rather than a tool for copyright enforcement. That this can be done at all should signal a significant flaw in the process, one in need of correcting.

Of course, the next update in this story may end being that Nintendo or The Pokemon Company render this drama moot by issuing their own DMCA notices to takedown both mods, which would be disappointing but not surprising. Still, this serves as a useful highlight of a flaw in the system that renders DMCA as a potential tool for censorship rather than protection.

Filed Under: ark: survival, censorship, copyright, dmca, mods, pokemon

Nintendo Opens Up New Front In War On Fans: ROM Mods

from the nintendo-hates-you dept

Let it never be forgotten that Nintendo hates you, Nintendo fans. The gaming giant has a long and decorated history both of anti-consumer practices, such as attempting to poison the roster of YouTuber game reviewers, bricking consoles if gamers don't agree to its post-release EULA updates, and attacking some of its biggest and most creative fans by issuing takedowns and threats for fan-made game levels, fan-made games that have barely anything to do with its IP, and shutting down fan-made remakes of games that are decades old.

Yet Nintendo has been notably lenient in some areas in enforcing its intellectual property as well. The most prominent of these would be what's referred to as "ROM hacks", in which the original Nintendo ROMs are modded to include new and original content. These ROM hacks abound and are readily available, requiring the original game (or a pirated version) in order to be used. Now, for the first time reported, one of these ROM hacks has fallen into the sights of Nintendo's lawyers.

A fan-made Pokémon ROM hack in the works for eight years was set to launch this Sunday. But a letter sent by Nintendo's Australian law firm on Wednesday has stopped those plans in their tracks. According to Adam "Koolboyman" Vierra, developer of the fan-made Pokémon Prism project, Nintendo's Australian law firm sent him a cease-and-desist letter, which he uploaded to Google Drive with identifying information redacted. (American representatives for Nintendo were not able to confirm the letter's authenticity as of press time.) The request alleges that Koolboyman's project, which alters the source ROM of the 1999 game Pokémon Gold to create an entirely new adventure, violates multiple Australian laws.

The location of all of this requires some explanation. Vierra lives in California and Nintendo's legal team is based out of the United States, but Vierra had been planning on releasing the game via Rijon.com, which is based in Australia. It was Nintendo's Australian legal team that sent the threat letter. That team has previously taken action against downloaders of pirated Nintendo games, but not on creative fans producing these kinds of ROM hacks. As noted before, the company worldwide has generally allowed these add-on mods to exist. Not so much in this case, for reasons not currently being offered by Nintendo.

But let's all not lose sight that this is a mod on a game nearly two decades old created by a fan to incorporate brand new gameplay and story elements into the existing game and engine, and was going to be offered free of charge. It's CounterStrike, in other words, except using a Nintendo product. And there are entire sites and fan-groups built around these sorts of mods. They're a boon to gaming companies by extending the life of the demand for a game for free, as fans take on the work of adding on to it in a way that still requires the original in order to play it at all.

And this isn't even Vierra's first go at this sort of thing.

Vierra himself might have assumed Nintendo would allow a Pokémon ROM hack, because his last one, Pokémon Brown, launched in 2004 with nothing in the way of dispute from Nintendo. That hack's new "Rijon" region would have been hugely expanded upon in Pokémon Prism. It would have contained other tweaks, such as Brown's special monster types (wood, gas, wind, abnormal, and sound), a tweak to the game's "clock" system, and new music compositions. (Other Pokémon ROM hack depositories are easy to find online.)

One could say that this all reeks of a legal team in a foreign country not being on the same page as the HQ back home. Except that it can also be said that expanding IP enforcement to this new front is perfectly in line with Nintendo's general heavy-handed approach to protectionism. Because Nintendo can't help itself. Because Nintendo hates you.

Filed Under: adam vierra, australia, fans, koolboyman, mods, rom hacks
Companies: nintendo

Sega/Steam Took Down A Bunch Of Legitimate Steam Workshop Mods Over Copyright Concerns

from the sigh dept

We've talked often about how common it is for legitimate customers to get caught up in attempts to thwart piracy and copyright infringement. From DRM keeping legit purchasers from using what they paid for to Fair Use uses of content getting taken down by automatic systems on sites like YouTube, it's worth noting whenever this happens. After all, there is an expression in the legal system that goes something like: I'd rather set 100 guilty people free than imprison a single innocent. The stakes when it comes to copyright aren't as high as jail time, typically, but it's interesting how little this mantra penetrates with those who would enforce copyright via carpet-bomb rather than a scalpel.

Take the recent incident with Sega's Steam Workshop mod-space, for instance, where dozens and dozens of mods within the platform suddenly disappeared.

Earlier this year Sega opened a Steam Workshop section for their Sega Mega Drive & Genesis Classics Hub, allowing modders to tinker with emulated versions of games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage. On Tuesday, dozens of those mods were removed without explanation.

Modders asking why their creations were taken down have received a stock reply from Steam Support: “Due to reporting of content that violates the Steam Terms of Service, the content in question has been removed from the Steam Community.”

Now, some of the mods taken down did indeed violate Steam's ToS, including some that weren't so much mods as they were full uploads of classic Sega games. Those takedowns make perfect sense. But many other mods were exactly the type that Sega itself had allowed, if not encouraged, which certainly did not violate the ToS. These included game mods to make games easier, mods to mix Sega games with the original music from their PC counterparts, and even mods designed to help those with certain disabilities play classic Sega games. We've even noted recently that Sega has made it clear that it wants gamers to mod its games in this way, even poking at its competitors for issuing these kinds of takedowns. So what gives?

Well, in a later update, PC Gamer posts a response from Sega. It essentially acknowledges that a bunch of innocent mods were taken down by an automated system not intelligent enough to discern between what was allowed and not allowed.

"SEGA would like to reiterate how delighted it is with how the Mega Drive/Genesis Collection community has self-moderated content on Steam Workshop. We've seen some fantastic mods created and released on the platform and want to encourage the community's continued creativity by helping to curate a library of outstanding mods.

"However, due to some erratic user behaviour over the last few days, many mods which didn't breach Steam's terms of service were automatically removed from Steam Workshop. SEGA and Valve are working together with the affected modders to reinstate their work as soon as possible and have already reversed a number of removals.

"SEGA and Valve are not actively removing mods that do not violate the terms of service, only those that do. We appreciate the help of the community's self-moderation in removing illegal or offensive content to maintain the high standard of legal mods on the platform. If you feel your mod does not breach the Steam terms of service but was removed, please contact community@sega.co.uk and SEGA will investigate."

Which, fine, but why not just reverse the automated process, put everything back up, and use those same Sega investigators to only take down the infringing mods? Why does the human element always seem to be reserved for remedying the mistakes as opposed to preventing them? Why must innocent modders suffer, like a villager caught in a cluster bomb?

Filed Under: mods, steam, video games
Companies: sega, valve

Samsung Issues Takedown On Video Of Grand Theft Auto 5 Mod Turning Galaxy Note 7 Into A Weapon

from the that's-not-a-copyright-issue dept

Another day, another weird copyright takedown for censorship rather than legit copyright reasons. Adrian Lopez alerts us to a YouTube video that no longer exists at that link. If you go there (as of right now), you get this: If you can't quite read the text up top, it says "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Samsung Electronics America, Inc. and its affiliates."

What that video used to be, according to the original description was:

GTA 5 Mod Showcasing the explosive Samsung Galaxy Note 7. You can blow people up with a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 in GTA V.

And there's the little thumbnail that was shown in the Twitter card for the video before it disappeared: In case you still don't get what's going on here, let's lay it out for you: there's a big story going on these days about how Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 devices are, well, catching fire (some prefer exploding, but it seems that they're mostly just setting themselves on fire). It's causing injuries and Samsung is in full on panic mode. It's now a felony to bring a Galaxy Note 7 on an airplane. This is the kind of stuff that business school case studies are written about years later, describing how Samsung handled this kind of crisis.

GTA 5, of course, is the video game Grand Theft Auto 5. And, like many video games, it's possible to mod (modify) those video games to add in other elements. And so it appears that someone took the "ripped from the headlines" stories of exploding Note 7s and created a GTA 5 mod that made such things into weapons you could use in the game.

It's kind of funny, actually.

What it is not, however, is copyright infringement. I don't care how you slice or dice it. It's not copyright infringement. Samsung may be embarrassed by its exploding devices, and it may not like people making fun of them or turning them into weapons in video games, but that doesn't matter. There's no copyright infringement against Samsung's copyrights in doing that. And it's flat out ridiculous that Samsung appears to have made a copyright claim over such a video. Hopefully whoever put up the video challenges this and YouTube comes to its senses...

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, galaxy note 7, grand theft auto, mods, takedown
Companies: samsung, youtube

Checking In: Blizzard Still Suing Hack/Cheat Makers For Copyright Infringement? Yup!

from the sigh dept

For some reason, gamemaker Blizzard has been totally smitten with the idea of twisting copyright law into an ugly pretzel to sue anyone who makes a hack or cheat for one of its games for some time now. They did this concerning Starcraft, then World of Warcraft, and then Starcraft 2. This lawsuit tactic is starting to become something of a right of passage for Blizzard's games, but the tactic in question makes little sense. Blizzard's argument can be roughly translated as: cheats and hacks break the EULA for the game, the game is licensed by the EULA instead of being owned by anyone paying for it, the game does regular copying of code and files while in use, therefore a hack or cheat that breaks the EULA renders all of that routine copying as copyright infringement. While this wrenching of copyright into these kinds of lawsuits has nothing to do with the actual purpose or general application of copyright law, many cheer these moves on, because cheaters within the communal games we play are annoying.

But the ends don't justify the means, and this kind of twisting of copyright law is dangerous, as we've pointed out in the past. Not that that's stopped Blizzard from utilizing this tactic, of course. In fact, recent Blizzard success Overwatch has become the latest to achieve this right of passage.

While most Overwatch players stick to the rules, there’s also a small group that tries to game the system. By using cheats such as the Watchover Tyrant, they play with an advantage over regular users. Blizzard is not happy with the Overwatch cheat and has filed a lawsuit against the German maker, Bossland GMBH, at a federal court in California. Bossland also sellscheats for various other titles such as World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm, which are mentioned in the complaint as well.

The game developer accuses the cheat maker of various forms of copyright infringement, unfair competition, and violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. According to Blizzard these bots and cheats also cause millions of dollars in lost sales, as they ruin the games for many legitimate players.

And it might indeed be true that these cheat hacks piss off some Overwatch gamers and might even drive some of them away from the game, costing Blizzard revenue. But, and I cannot stress this enough, that doesn't suddenly make any of this copyright infringement. To see what lengths Blizzard's legal team is going to in order to twist this all together, one need look only at the claims the filing makes.

First, it claims that Bossland is committing contributory infringement by offering the hack, because the hack breaks the EULA, which makes accessing the game suddenly fraudulent, and all the routine copying the game does becomes copyright infringement. This, again, relies on the idea that the game is licensed rather than bought, and that breaking the EULA renders the license invalid. This has never been the way copyright has worked in the past.

Second, the filing claims that the hack's ability to provide a graphical overlay over the regular game is the creation of a derivative work, which is also copyright infringement. Except the overlay isn't copying any part of the game, nor is it making works expanding on the game. It's just an overlay, or a HUD.

Only then does the filing accuse Bossland of contractual interference, which is probably the most sound charge in the whole thing. Even then, hacks and cheats have long been a staple of the video game ecosystem, with most gamemakers embracing modding communities, and even embedding cheats within their own games. This has changed somewhat with the rise of online multiplayer games, where these kinds of cheats break the game in some ways, but still, entering into a legal challenge over all of this instead of jumping back into the fray of game development to try to keep the cheaters out seems strange.

And filing all of this in a California court has pretty much everyone, including the folks at Bossland, scratching their heads.

TF spoke with Bossland CEO Zwetan Letschew, who informed us that his company hasn’t received the complaint at its office yet. However, they are no stranger to Blizzard’s legal actions.

“There are over 10 ongoing legal battles in Germany already,” Letschew says, noting that it’s strange that Blizzard decided to take action in the US after all these years. “Now Blizzard wants to try it in the US too. One could ask himself, why now and not back in 2011. Why did Rod Rigole [Blizzard Deputy General Counsel] even bother to fly to Munich and drive with two other lawyers 380 km to Zwickau. Why not just sue us in the US five years ago?”

While Letschew still isn’t convinced that the lawsuit is even real, he doesn’t fear any legal action in the U.S. According to the CEO, a California court has no jurisdiction over his company, as it has no ties with the United States.

It should be noted that much of the time these legal attempts by Blizzard don't result in wins for its legal team. And that's not even taking into account the questions of jurisdiction and/or what a California court ruling will result in for a company abroad. I'm a little lost as to why Blizzard is even bothering with this, to be honest.

Filed Under: cheats, copyright, hacking, mods, overwatch
Companies: blizzard

That Didn't Take Long: MLB Plans Action Against Fallout 4 David Ortiz Mod

from the swing-and-a-miss dept

Fallout 4 was recently released to a world full of ready gamers eager to get their paws on the latest installment in the franchise. And, because the game was released on the PC, modders immediately got to work on the title, coming up with fun little customizations for it. Those mods ranged from altering the companions players can recruit within the game to more cosmetic changes. One of those cosmetic changes included a custom outfit which allowed for players to don a David Ortiz Boston Red Sox jersey while cracking skulls with a baseball bat for a weapon. And, of course, Major League Baseball got its knickers in a twist over it.

If you're not aware, this latest game takes place in post-apocolyptic Boston. The player can roam the streets of the once-great city, picking up any number of items along the way to aid in their quest. The game even includes a bombed out depiction of Fenway Park, where the Red Sox play. One modder took the next logical step.

Richie Branson created a David Ortiz mod, and gave players the chance to bash baddies in a full Red Sox uniform. (Kindly overlook the fact that Big Papi’s actually a lefty.) It was a neat, free customization, but MLB was not as receptive. Steve Annear of the Boston Globe received a terse comment about the mod from a league spokesman:

“The use of these marks is an infringement of our rights. We plan to enforce those rights,” an MLB spokesman said in an e-mail Thursday.

Branson had reportedly said that if MLB actually requested it, he would voluntarily take the mod down. It seems likely that request came, because the mod is no longer available for download. And for what? The modding community regularly makes use of existing material in doing their work. Characters from one series are brought into another. Weapons from one set of fiction are foisted in a game where they did not originally appear. And, yes, David Ortiz's Red Sox jersey made its way into Fallout 4. The mod wasn't being sold. The mod wasn't made by the folks behind Fallout 4. This was an independent modder having a little bit of fun.

And MLB shut it down. Is there really commerce to consider here in protecting the team's trademarks? Please. No, this is permission culture run amok. Thanks to this little power play, gamers are denied the opportunity to bash in mutant skulls while wearing an Ortiz jersey. Just like the framers of trademark law intended, I guess.

Filed Under: david ortiz, fallout 4, mods, privacy rights, trademark, video games
Companies: mlb

Rockstar Whips Out The Ban-Hammer On GTAV Players Over Mod

from the bans-on-fans dept

There's something a bit strange going on over at Rockstar Games. The makers of the Grand Theft Auto series have reportedly banned several players in the past week, all of them associated with a particular GTA5 game mod called "FiveM." Rockstar's reasoning for the ban will sound familiar to many observers of gaming in the online space.

Last week, Rockstar banned a number of Grand Theft Auto V players associated with the "FiveM" mod, which offers players an online playspace separate from the game's official "Grand Theft Auto: Online" mode. Yesterday, a Rockstar representative told Ars that the bans were made because the mod is "an unauthorized alternate multiplayer service that contains code designed to facilitate piracy."

This is the increasingly common refrain from companies handing out bans for online games for players that develop things like cracks, which are designed to allow those pirating the game to participate in the online portion of the game. Were you to not dig into the story any further, you'd likely assume that's exactly what was going on, given that Rockstar raised the piracy boogeyman in its statement.

Except FiveM doesn't appear to be anything remotely resembling a crack at all. Instead, FiveM appears to be a mod with its own launcher that allows GTA5 players to play online on dedicated servers, with a relaxed stance on player mods being used in the online experience. The whole point of FiveM is that Rockstar doesn't allow mods in its official online experience, so the modders created their own online play-space where mods would be allowed.

"FiveM is not a crack for GTA V nor does it actively try to facilitate piracy," said Qais Patankar, who goes by qaisjp online. While Patankar didn't contribute code to the FiveM mod directly, he says he was caught up in Rockstar's bans for promoting the mod through online channels like Reddit. Patankar argues that those behind FiveM shouldn't be penalized just because the mod fails to check if the underlying game is a legitimate copy. "Whilst the mod doesn't prevent people who have illegally obtained the game to play FiveM, it does not behave like a crack: [it doesn't] bypass the verification system so that you can play the game without paying," he said.

While Rockstar's stated policy does ban "online" mods (as opposed to mods to the single-player game), Patankar argues that FiveM shouldn't be targeted by a policy designed to prevent cheating in a centralized playspace. "There's different ways you can 'spin' this," he said. "FiveM is a mod that works online, but it doesn't modify anything in the [core] online experience. It does mod online code, and it does utilize online things, but it does not affect [GTA:O]."

And that changes how we see Rockstar's statement. Instead of banning players for facilitating piracy in the common way we typically see it, this sure does look like Rockstar banning modders for creating an online GTA experience that might in some way compete with its own. That this separate online space was developed specifically for players that want to play the game online differently than Rockstar allows seems to suggest that even the worry over competition is theoretical at best, since these are players using mods that Rockstar doesn't want used.

But the strangest part of the story is that one of the developers of the mod reportedly is suggesting that Rockstar sent private investigators to his home, apparently just to scare him.

So I just got a pair of PIs at my door claiming to be sent by Take Two, handing me a phone with a person somewhere in the UK or US or whatever to 'discuss how to cease my activities with regard to Grand Theft Auto', that 'they know what happened before with Activision and want to not get the lawyers involved at this time', however they 'have tested their legal standing already and are quite certain of their point' and 'aren't willing to accept any solution other than ceasing my activiites'. Oh, they also 'couldn't disclose any conversations they're having with other modification developers', didn't want to talk about general modification policy as 'it was just about my case' and admitted they 'looked through my source code'.

Is a little mod that creates a unique GTA: Online experience really so terrifying that Rockstar felt the need to send the Stasi knocking on the modder's door? How about just offer another online experience that allows mods? Why is that the more difficult route to go, compared with hiring PIs and raising the piracy boogeyman?

Filed Under: gtav, mods, video games
Companies: rockstar

Valve Tries Out Paid Mods Platform; It Fails Completely

from the money-money-money dept

Honestly, when I first caught wind that Valve was going to suddenly make its platform available for game modders to sell their mods for good old-fashioned money, I initially thought it was great. However, it took only a couple of moments of thinking to realize what a mess this would all be. Taking a modding ecosystem, where talented modders create add-ons and alterations of original games that give gamers exactly what they want, or more of what they want, and injecting money into it represented a misunderstanding of the relationship between modders and gamers, and a failure to understand the gaming community's obvious reaction. Keep in mind that modders already have been making money on Steam, except that they've done so when their mods become desired enough or revered enough to warrant full and separate releases within the game store. This was to be different: modders selling smaller mods within the original game's Steam page. Mods, mind you, help make individual games and entire platforms like Steam more desirable to gamers, also known as Valve's customers. Injecting money this way had what probably should have been easy to predict unintended consequences.

First, the backlash by the gaming community was immediate, and it was strong.

It's not uncommon for people to ask for donations, a nickel or two going clink in the cup, but charging upfront? Definitely not the standard. Some, however, are worried that it could become the norm, not the exception, which would fundamentally alter the mod scene. Mods, they fear (and have, to a small extent, observed), will stop updating for those who don't pay, will abandon mod-centric services like Nexus for Steam's greener pastures.

And:

The feedback wasn't any better on Twitter, where the sentiment expressed seemed to be at its most optimistic when complaining about feelings of abandonment by the modding community, once thought to be simply a faction of the gamer-side of the larger ecosystem and now firmly placed in the sellers category with game-makers, and at its most pessimistic when predicting that Valve's move represents the beginning of the end of modding as a whole. The latter was never true, I'll say, and frankly nobody should be pointing fingers at Valve for this at all. If the market supported paid mods, it would have worked.

It didn't work and part of the reason it didn't does indeed have the tint of an IP issue at its heart. It turns out there was an IP issue over one of the early, if not first, mods offered in Valve's store, with all the accusations of infringement over the work of others that you'd expect — except the issue is between modders and doesn't involve the game-maker at all.

As Destructoid and PC Gamer point out, “Art of the Catch” was created by modders Chesko and aqqh. It also allegedly uses assets from another mod by a modder known as Fore without permission. Fore apparently confronted the Chesko (though, the original comment seems to have been deleted).

If you pay any attention to the modding space, you already know where this is going. It's very common for some mods to incorporate other mods within the larger distribution. This can happen when modders create total conversion mods, where a game is radically changed by implementing a plethora of previously-made mods, or it can happen when the aim of a mod is to drastically change an aspect of the game and a previous mod did part of the work already. What has always happened is that permission was attained to use the mod, credit was given in the release notes of the new mod, and everyone was happy because mods weren't charged for.

Now, we have two modders in a pissing match (though Chesko has reportedly been reaching out to Fore to clear this all up), all due to money exchanging hands. Not only that, but there have been complaints that Steam is punishing users who are raising their voices on the issue. In other words, Valve took a modding ecosystem that was working perfectly well, injected money into it, and the problems arose almost immediately. As for the overall effect these kinds of disputes can have on the modding community? Well, for what it's worth, Chesko is talking about quitting the whole scene entirely, so there's that.

Between that and the general customer reaction to the rollout of this paid mods scheme, it seems clear that Valve never really thought this through. What started off as a Twitter bitch-fest from upset gamers evolved into the kind of protest-comedy only the internet can produce. The end result was Steam's most popular Skyrim mod being a protest against paid mods, allowing characters to carry around a protest placard within the game. And, after the customers and fans had spoken, game developers will have their turn. One of them, Bethesda, makers of the afore-mentioned Skyrim, pulled all paid mods for the game entirely. The public comments from Valve, in conjunction with news that they will offer full refunds on all the Skyrim mods that had already been purchased, don't inspire much confidence, either.

"We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing," Valve said in a community update. "We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different...But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here."

Look, I don't actually have a problem with modders trying to make money from their work, and I have zero problem with Valve providing a platform for that...I just don't think it will ever actually work. The modding community functions in a way that doesn't benefit from the injection of money-making opportunities for these more modest mods, which are among the most popular. But, as I mentioned at the open, it's not like modders can't make money from Steam. They do, and have. You've probably heard of some of them, like DayZ, or Team Fortress, and The Stanley Parable. All of those games started off as mods (in the case of Team Fortress — now one of Valve's most profitable properties — years before the Steam store even existed) and all of them now have full Steam game pages themselves. The gaming market worked that out on its own.

And you can bet that the smarter game publishers out there aren't going to get on board with allowing paid mods on their Steam pages now that the backlash is in full swing. Mods make games more buy-able, and a negative aspect in the modding community for a particular game isn't something a publisher is going to want to put up with (see: Bethesda).

Whatever Valve thought this was going to be, it isn't.

Filed Under: markets, mods, money, paid mods, steam
Companies: valve

Koei Tecmo Goes DMCA On DOA Modders For Undressing Its Already Scantily Clad Characters

from the a-mod-too-far dept

I won't pretend to know every in and out of the Dead or Alive series. That's partially because I gave up fighting games once I hit junior high, and partially because my gaming habits tend to cleave to particular franchises generally and DoA wasn't amongst those I patronized. But I gather the series has been mostly about offering up characters, and setting them to beat the hell out of one another for fun and amusement. I can see where there might be fun in that.

What I can't see is why the creator of such a game series would want to make the kinds of moral arguments against modders that DoA producer Yosuke Hayashi made in conjunction with Koei Tecmo going all DMCA crazy on mods that removed the wardrobes of the fairer characters of DoA 5: Last Round.

"We have to deal with mod issues from an IP holder perspective," Koei Tecmo producer Yosuke Hayashi said in an interview with trade publication MCV. "We would like to ask PC users to play our game in good moral and manner. Otherwise, we won’t be able to release a title for PC again."

Now, is the dedication some modders show to making sure that female characters are disrobed a level 20 on the creepy scale? Sure, I think that's fair. But, from a business perspective, why is Tecmo interested in going the DMCA route on the modding community? Whatever you think of the mods themselves, it's difficult to mount a logical argument for going to war with the modding community, which is typically made up of either a game's fan-base or talented modders serving some portion of the fan-base. Either way, mods are strictly for the interested, meaning they can only make a product more desirable, not less. What good comes from the company trying to hide these mods using intellectual property law?

As for the moral argument, please let me just type "haha" here and imagine I kept repeating those two letters infinitely, because, seriously, c'mon. The DoA series only strayed form its chief thematic vehicle of human beings beating the ever-loving shit out of one another in order to tantalize dumb teenage boys by creating spinoff series in which the female DoA characters play volleyball in laughably small bikinis, spinoffs in which the female characters are photographed in laughably small bikinis, and spinoffs in which the female characters can play almost-strip-poker with the player. Let me see if I can draw you a picture of morality using DoA imagery.

The gravity-defying boob physics represent the necessity of a firm moral stance...or something...

The point is that there seems to be little sense in any of this from Tecmo's perspective. Moral arguments are for those with moral authority, and good gaming business is to let modders have-at-it, as it were.

Filed Under: dmca, doa, modders, mods, morality, yosuke hayashi
Companies: koei tecmo

Dark Souls Modder Gets Copyright Threat From Game Developer For Some Reason

from the facepalm dept

It's an old story: video game is released, modder makes it better, game developer reacts by treating modders like idiots, even though modding makes the original game more attractive for purchase. It's not always this way of course; some game developers are capable of seeing the value in the modding community. Too many, unfortunately, do not. But when a game modder makes a game better and then gets a legal threat from the developer, well, that's just downright stupid.

Dark Souls users on PC have had their lives made infinitely better with modder Durante's DSFix, which serves to fix some of the game's rendering issues. Today, Durante received a rather unpleasant surprise when he was slapped with a copyright infringement notice, seemingly from Bandai Namco. Durante contends on NeoGAF that none of his work specifically infringes on any copyrights, since it doesn't actually use any game code.

Issuing a threat due to a game mod is something of an extension of how Blizzard has behaved in the past. In that case, the issue was going after cheaters within the online gaming community. Wrong as it may have been, there was at least some semblance of good intentions in that case, even if the unintended consequences for copyright caselaw could have been damaging. In this case? Why would a game developer go after a modder who did nothing except make the original game better and more attractive to potential buyers? I don't get it. It appears that some folks working for Bandai Namco aren't sure why this happened either.

Meanwhile, Bandai Namco appears to be taken aback by this, with community manager J. Kartje acknowledging on Twitter that he's actively looking into this situation.

@OroboroTheNinja @BandaiNamcoUS @BandaiNamcoUK thx for heads up. Not sure what's going on, but I'll try to find out. — J. Kartje (@JKartje) December 23, 2014

There's been no update from Kartje on the situation since that last tweet, so apparently the "goings on" haven't been "seen" yet, but there are replies to the tweet string that indicate fans would never had made the purchase of Dark Souls for their PC if the mod hadn't been available. One would hope the folks over at Bandai Namco would reign in whoever thought firing off a silly copyright threat was a good idea and make things right with the modder.

Filed Under: dark souls, dsfix, durante, mods, video games
Companies: bandai namco