Game Exclusivity Wars Are Upon Us And Valve's Anti-Review-Bombing Process Is Without A Rip-Cord

from the convenient dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about the rather sudden emergence of Epic Games' entry into the game distribution business. In a move to directly compete with Valve's Steam, the Epic's store has been attempting to gobble up AAA titles into a program of limited exclusivity, typically six months. The lure for all this is a split for Epic and the game publisher that is more generous for the latter. Valve, meanwhile, responded to one of the larger stories about a game going Epic exclusive, Metro Exodus, by complaining that it was bad for gamers generally and Steam users specifically. That quite predictably served as a rallying cry for Steam users to go to the store pages for other Deep Silver Metro games and bomb those pages with negative reviews that had nothing to do with those games and everything to do with the exclusivity deal.

All of which is at odds with Steam's policies and the platform's stated goals of preventing review-bombing of this type. But as the exclusivity wars appear to be upon us, with more games jumping on with Epic, it's becoming clearer that this is probably a purposeful strategy on Valve's end. The latest example of this is the announcement that the next game in the Borderlands series has signed on with Epic to be exclusive for six months. The backlash on Steam was almost immediate.

Over the course of yesterday and today, Borderlands 2 has received nearly 1,600 new negative Steam reviews, while Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel has been hit with 420 and Borderlands: Game Of The Year Edition has picked up 320. These games are receiving renewed attention not just because of the Borderlands 3 announcement, but also because Gearbox recently updated the Borderlands Handsome Collection with new HD textures and put the series on sale. Still, you need only look at Borderlands 2's top reviews to see what much of the negativity is about.

“Love the game, but I can’t recommend it because the sequel will be exclusive somewhere else,” reads one highly upvoted review.

“Scummy company that insults every single person that purchased the game on this site,” says another. “Skip it.”

It's quite obvious that these are not legitimate reviews. They are, however, quite useful as a barometer for how gamers generally see these kinds of exclusivity deals. Much like the market fragmentation that has become the streaming entertainment industry, these types of deals can only serve to frustrate the gaming public. Suddenly, due strictly to business interests, gamers aren't certain where to find the games they want, or if their platform of choice will even have them, or when. That's not a great concept for maximizing the growth of an industry that has exploded mostly without this type of fragmentation. While the console market has always had some of this, expanding it to the PC market makes little sense, since there's no hardware-specific tie in. It's just going to piss people off, and that's already starting.

On the other hand, Steam and Valve sure seem to be taking the most cynical route possible, given that it recently committed to ending this kind of review bombing.

Last month, Valve revealed a solution to Steam’s increasingly ubiquitous review bomb problem: a new system where a human team digs through reeking piles of fishy reviews surfaced by an automated program, and—if they find those reviews to be sufficiently suspicious—they’ll “mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer.” Then they’ll remove those reviews from the game’s overall score and stop other reviews posted in the same period from counting.

Currently, it’s impossible to say whether or not Valve has reached out to Gearbox, but the company has yet to make any marks or remove these clearly trolling reviews from Borderlands games’ scores.

That sure makes it look like Valve is just letting this all happen to punish a company that chose to do business with another platform. If that isn't what this is, then Valve should come out forcefully and say so. If it is what Valve is doing, then it's hard to conclude anything other than the company is undermining its own user review system, which is one of the most useful aspects of Steam.

Regardless, it appears the exclusivity wars have come to PC gaming. And that sucks no matter the specifics around Borderlands reviews.

Filed Under: competition, epic, exclusivity, platforms, silos, steam, video games
Companies: epic, valve

The Sky Is Rising: The Entertainment Industry Is Thriving, Almost Entirely Because Of The Internet

from the and-things-keep-getting-better dept

Announcing The Sky Is Rising 2019: a new report offering a detailed look at the entertainment industry.

A funny thing happened on the way to the internet supposedly destroying the entertainment industry. It saved the entertainment industry instead.

A little over seven years ago, we released our first Sky is Rising report for CCIA. At the time, the key point we found in looking at the state of the modern entertainment industry was that the parts that were whining the loudest about how awful the internet was for content were only representing a very small part of the actual content industries. Recorded music may have been struggling as a business, but every other aspect of the music business was thriving. More music was being produced than ever before. More music was being consumed than ever before. More people were spending more money on music than ever before -- just not in the traditional ways. Ditto for video. And books. As we noted back in that original report, if you focused on the supposed true purpose of copyright -- to "promote the progress" of content production -- it was clear that the internet had made that possible a lot more than "copyright" law ever did.

Today, again in partnership with CCIA, we're releasing our brand new Sky is Rising report for 2019, again looking at the state of the global entertainment industry. And, once again, it's thriving. But something big has changed in the past decade or so: even the legacy parts that were struggling when we put together the last report, the parts that were most impacted by the transformative nature of the internet, are now thriving as well. And in basically every case it's because of the internet that the legacy companies have shunned and complained about (not to mention demanded a continuous, never-ending, new set of laws to "tame" the very internet that is saving them).

A few tidbits from the report, though I recommend reading the whole thing. Despite the doom and gloom statements from the industry about how consumers were just "getting stuff for free" and no longer interested in paying for content, the data shows that consumers continue to increase their spending. There was a temporary drop off... but it coincided not with the rise of the internet, but with the 2008 financial crisis:

The recorded music business is often the poster child for an industry "wrecked" by the internet. And you could potentially have made that argument a few years ago if you totally ignored the fact that more people were making and releasing music than ever before. But certainly, "recorded" music revenue had dropped... until, starting around 2014, that turned around. And it's entirely due to streaming music, which last year accounted for nearly half of all recorded music revenue, and continues to grow at an astounding clip. Anyone who says that the internet has destroyed the recorded music business is lying to you:

But, that's not all. As we detail in the report, all other aspects of the music business have continued to thrive -- with much of it being because of the internet. The live music business has continued to grow. Music publishing and performance rights have continued to grow. Music merchandising has become a massive business in its own right. It's literally nearly impossible to find any part of the music business that is struggling these days, despite what some folks in the industry will tell you. Of course, if you're wondering why the RIAA and others changed their talking points from complaining about "piracy" to the made up concept of "the value gap," this is why. They realized that things were going great, and all their talk about piracy killing the industry was increasingly going to ring hollow. So they invented this purely fictional concept of a "value gap" which is basically just whining that other industries are too successful and need to be forced to hand over more money. This too is an old playbook for the RIAA labels, who have spent decades trying to squeeze every penny out of any successful online service, continually insisting that if anyone else makes a dime off of music, it should instead go to the labels.

The video world is another fascinating realm. Netflix and other streaming video providers have helped created the golden age of TV-style programming these days. We detail in the report just how much Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming video services have been spending on content, leading to massive growth in original scripted TV programming. But, it's not just the online streaming services. The number of original scripted TV programs on broadcast, basic cable and premium cable has also risen over the past decade. And this is all happening despite so much competition from other things people can do with their free time:

On the movie side of the coin, box office revenue continues to increase, both in the US and abroad. People are continuing to go to the movies, and more movies than ever before are being created around the globe. There was so much data here, we finally just had to stop adding more to get the report out.

In the past, some people argued that just talking about box office numbers was unfair, because where the internet was really having an impact was in destroying the home video market. There was some amount of irony in that given just how loudly and fiercely the MPAA itself had fought against there ever being a home video market (cue former MPAA boss Jack Valenti's famous Congressional testimony, in which he declared: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."). That wasn't true back then, and it's certainly not true today either. A few years after Valenti said that, the home video market brought in more revenue than the box office -- and that's still true today. The home video market is growing fast -- and it's almost all because of the internet. Note how much of the market is now subscription based, rather than transactional. That's Netflix's innovation, not the movie studios.

And then there's books. Once again, rather than destroying the market, the internet has saved it. More and more books are being published. Interestingly, in the book market, the story was a bit different than elsewhere. While ebooks and audiobooks are now a significant portion of the book market, physical books seem to be making a bit of a comeback -- and a lot of that has to do with the ability to buy them online.

Indeed, what we found in our research is that a tremendous uptick in new books is coming from authors self-publishing (in 2017, over a million self-published books were released for the first time -- a massive increase over the past decade). Believe it or not, most of those self-published books are available as paper books, rather than ebooks, thanks to internet services like Amazon CreateSpace, Lulu and Blurb.

Indeed, as we saw back in the 2012 report, a huge part of the story of today's entertainment industry is how much is now being driven not by the old gatekeepers, but by the fact that anyone can make use of the internet to create: whether it's video, movies, music, books, or video games, lots of people are using the internet to create, to build an audience, to distribute globally... and to make some money. So many of the new "stars" are coming up via the internet, rather than waiting for some legacy gatekeeper to discover them. That hasn't made those gatekeepers obsolete, but it's certainly taken away some of their leverage.

Back in 2011, we noted that so many people kept referring to their being some sort of "war" between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, but it struck us as odd that Silicon Valley kept coming up with the "weapons" that seemed likely to help Hollywood thrive. Eight years later, the evidence is in: the entertainment industry is thriving. The sky is rising. And Hollywood should be thanking the internet, rather than continuing to attack it at every single turn.

Go check out the full Sky Is Rising 2019 Report for a detailed look at the state of the entertainment industry today.

Filed Under: books, hollywood, movies, music, sky is rising, tv, video, video games

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Garden Of God

from the like-it's-1923 dept

Last week, we looked at one of the two titles that tied for the Best Visuals category in our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923. This week, we're shining the spotlight on the other winner in that category: The Garden of God by DreadRoach.

As I mentioned last week, any game made in 30 days will need to be creative and cut a few corners if it's going to feature engaging visuals. Where last week's Chimneys and Tulips did that with a minimalist approach focused on color and typography, The Garden of God does it by building on a strong foundation: the graphic sprites and convenient capabilities of RPG Maker MV, the most popular tool for making JRPG-like games. But sprites are just one piece of a game's visual puzzle, and DreadRoach used that pre-made palette to paint some excellently designed environments:

Based on a 1923 novel by H. De Vere Stacpoole, The Garden of God is a short, linear narrative experience that tells a simplified version of the first portion of the story, and manages to very effectively capture some of its key characterizations and emotional beats even as it reduces chapters of text to a few lines of dialogue. The story is short enough that it's not worth trying to summarize — just take a few minutes to play it through — except to say it's about a crew investigating something at sea:

In addition to the skilled map design and use of sprites, the game employs a few nice little scripted sequences as characters interact, with occasional bits of background activity. Most of the actual story is conveyed by dialogue, but there are also objects in the world to be examined for more clues about what's happening, in the style of an adventure game. Though it's all pretty simple and straightforward, it was one of the only games that aimed for an ambitious and robust visual aspect, and that caught the eyes of all our judges. You can play The Garden of God in your browser from its page on Itch, and don't forget to check out our other winners as well as the many great entries that didn't quite make the cut.

Filed Under: game jam, public domain, video games

Slow Broadband, Usage Caps Could Mar Google Stadia's Game Streaming Ambitions

from the ill-communication dept

I can remember being at E3 in 2000 and being pitched on the idea of a sort of "dumb terminal" for gaming. As in, you wouldn't need a computer or game console in your home, since all of the actual game processing would be accomplished in the cloud then streamed to your TV via broadband. Most of these early pitches never materialized. Initially because cloud computing simply wasn't fully baked yet, but also thanks to America' shoddy broadband.

Cloud-based game streaming is something the industry has continued to push for, though nobody has yet to truly crack the market. Onlive probably tried the hardest, though again a lack of real cloud horsepower and sketchy residential broadband prevented the service from truly taking off.

Undaunted, Google took to the stage at the Game Developers Conference to unveil Stadia, a looming game streaming platform that will let gamers play top-shelf games on any hardware with a Chrome browser. Google insists that the service, when it launches this summer, will be able to drive games at up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second seamlessly between multiple devices with no need for game consoles, high-end PCs, loading times, or installs. The whole presentation is available here:

If anybody can make the idea work it's certainly Google, whose massive transit and cloud computing firepower should give it a leg up on past efforts. Unfortunately for Google, the service still faces a daunting foe. One Google has previously tried and failed to disrupt: the shoddy state of US broadband:

"Generally, streaming a game at 1080p requires latency of less than 20ms and downstream speeds of at least 25 Mbps. But raw throughput is just one of numerous factors that can impact the responsiveness of game streaming. Upstream speeds, the quality of your router, and even congestion at internet peering and interconnection points can impact game play.

Google hopes to sidestep some of this by having the lion’s share of the streaming traffic travel over its own datacenter and transit links. But that data still needs to make its way to your home via the “last mile,” or your ISP. And if your ISP is terrible, your Google Stadia experience is likely to mirror that reality."

In addition to slow speeds (thanks to countless US telcos that refuse to upgrade their networks), Google's new service will also need to contend with the bullshit, arbitrary usage caps and overage fees giants like Comcast have been imposing on their networks in the wake of little to no real competition. While there are not many services that can blow through Comcast's 1 terabyte cap ($10 per each additional 50 gigabytes thereafter), streaming games at 4K or 8K certainly will. Many ISPs, especially slower telcos, impose usage caps that are far less generous.

The other issue to keep an eye on will be net neutrality. ISPs like Verizon are working on their own game streaming services. Given that incumbent ISPs are already removing usage caps if you use their own video streaming service, there's really not much stopping an ISP from doing the same thing with gaming. It's the culmination of a vision telecom giants like Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T have had for years, where they impose arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions and caveats to simultaneously cash in on--and disadvantage--companies they want to directly compete with. If you can't win, cheat.

Given its cloud firepower Google can certainly pull the idea off. And if Google doesn't, somebody else will. Replacing high-end PCs and pricey game consoles with a simple cloud-based, multi-device game streaming subscription service seems like the obvious next step. But the process is going to once again shine a light on how the broken, monopoly-dominated telecom sector has some very real problems tech refuses to address and fix. Problems that harm not only the public, but countless attempts to innovate and disrupt other, existing sectors. Game streaming is going to shine a very bright light on this reality.

Filed Under: broadband, cloud gaming, competition, stadia, streaming, video games
Companies: at&t, google, verizon

Unknown Nintendo Game Gets Digitized With Museum's Help, Showing The Importance Of Copyright Exceptions

from the lost-history dept

Roughly a year ago, we wrote about how museums were requesting an exception to the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions in order to preserve online games. While the Librarian of Congress has already allowed for exceptions for preserving non-online games, the request led to pushback by the Entertainment Software Association, which indicated preserving online games would be copyright infringement. Nintendo is a member of the ESA and the gaming giant was at the same time going around to ROMs sites all over the internet and either threatening them with legal action or scaring them into shutting down. This happened all while Nintendo also released several retro consoles, essentially cashing in on the nostalgia that the emulation sites had kept alive for the past decade or so.

All of which is to say this: Nintendo is not generally friendly to the idea of preserving Nintendo games via digitization that it does not control itself. Standing in contrast to that is the recent discovery of an otherwise essentially unknown Nintendo game from 30 years ago that, upon discovery, was swiftly digitized for posterity.

When UWC—a NES game that had been hidden from the world for 30 years—was uncovered last week, one of the first orders of business was getting the game off a cartridge and into the digital realm so that it could be properly preserved.  The new owner of the game, Stephan Reese, aka Archon 1981, said as much last week, and that job has now been completed thanks to the efforts of the Video Game History Foundation.

Saying “we were more than happy to lend our expertise and digitize the game for its owner”, the VGHF haven’t just ripped the game, but also went and finished it (as in, played to the end, not finished development), uploading gameplay footage to YouTube so we can all see some more of UWC in action.

Were it not for the exceptions that allowed the VGHF to have helped Reese out, the game could quite easily have been lost to history. Perhaps more importantly, if the general posture of companies like Nintendo led someone like Reese to believe the illegality of this wasn't even worth questioning, the world may never have seen this game at all. And, whatever you think of the importance of gaming to our culture, it cannot be argued that this would have been a cultural loss concerning the history of a popular entertainment medium.

These exceptions to copyright law are very, very important. This is just one of many examples as to why and yet another reminder that the pervasive culture of ownership and restriction carries with it a danger to literally everyone else who is living or will live. That danger is the potential to lose parts of our culture and history.

Filed Under: archives, copyright, copyright exceptions, digitization, lost content, lost games, nes, uwc, video games
Companies: nintendo

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Chimneys And Tulips

from the like-it's-1923 dept

In our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923, we had a tie in one of our prize categories, with two entries winning Best Visuals. This week, we're putting the winner spotlight on the first of those two games: Chimneys and Tulips by litrouke.

Graphics are famously among the most labor- and resource-intensive parts of the game development process, so in a 30-day game jam, achieving something visually noteworthy isn't easy. It takes ingenuity and inspiration, and that's exactly what this game has, even if it's a little lacking on the gameplay side. Chimneys and Tulips is a creative presentation of four poems by E. E. Cummings as short interactive design experiences, with a focus on typography. Each one has a different style, and aims to harmonize its graphical and interactive elements with the meaning of the poem.

The first poem, gee i like to think of dead, is presented as a fairly simple linear story, interspersed with illustrative icons, that reveals itself one piece at a time. All in green went my love riding is more intricate, using a "swapping" mechanic for the opening words and offering more and more colorful typography as it progresses. Picasso you give us uses some additional graphics and a simple but captivating animation trick, and is the most visually elaborate of the four. And why did you go little fourpaws deconstructs itself as the user clicks on various words, all the while slowly fading from view.

Though simple, the visuals in Chimneys and Tulips were more closely and thoughtfully united with the game's purpose and content than just about any other entry, which earned it a win for the category alongside another game that we'll feature next week. You can play Chimneys and Tulips in your browser from its page on Itch, and don't forget to check out our other winners as well as the many great entries that didn't quite make the cut.

Filed Under: game jam, poetry, public domain, video games

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure

from the gaming-like-it's-1923 dept

Yesterday, we announced the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923. We had a lot of great entries that deserve to be played, so for the next few Saturdays we're going to highlight some of the winning in the various categories.

This week, it's our winner for Best Digital Game: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure by Alex Blechman.

Most of you are probably familiar with the Robert Frost poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, which was published in 1923 and as of this year is officially in the public domain. Well, here's what the introduction of this tongue-in-cheek game adaptation has to say about that:

Robert Frost's classic poem about stopping in the woods for no reason is very well written, but it's also pretty boring.

Not much happens. A dumb guy stops to look at some snow, and his horse gets weirded out by him. Dull. Yawn. Snoozeville.

Maybe that was considered an action-packed poem back in 1923, when Frost wrote it, but it's overdue for an update.

That's where you, the player, comes in. In this simple browser game, you are tasked with updating Frost's poem to sate a modern audience's craving for action, adventure, and... treasure! Verse by verse, you are presented with the poem and given the ability to swap out various nouns, verbs and adjectives for more exciting alternatives. So this:

...becomes something like this:

With some prompting and encouragement, you'll edit the entire poem in this fashion, until finally gazing upon your finished creation. Yeah: it's a very simple game, but one that made lots of us crack a smile and give it a second playthrough to see if we could do an even better editing job. It's funny, well-written and succinct, and we're thrilled to call it our winner for Best Digital Game. Check it out now on Itch, and share your best poem in the comments!

Next week, we'll take a look at another one of the winners, though you can always explore them all right now as well as all the other entries that didn't quite make the cut.

Filed Under: game jam, public domain, video games

Announcing The Winners Of The Public Domain Game Jam!

from the like-it's-1923 dept

The votes are in, and it's time to announce the winners of the Gaming Like It's 1923 game jam!

At the beginning of January, we decided to celebrate the long-awaited entry of new works into the public domain with a game jam, inviting designers to submit games of all kinds based on newly-copyright-free works from 1923. We got way more entries than we expected, and handed them off to our huge judging panel of game designers and copyright experts, who left comments and nominated them in our six prize categories. Now we've tallied up the votes and reviews, so without further delay, here are the winners of Gaming Like It's 1923:

Best Analog Game — Permanence by Jackson Tegu

This award goes to the best overall non-computer game, with a clear consensus emerging from the judge's review scores. Permanence is perplexing at first glance, and requires some serious prep work, but sometimes that's the cost of a game this unique and creative. Using the format of a book that can be read in two directions, it weaves the painting Metempsychosis by Yokoyama Taikan and poetry from the book The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran into an artistic gaming experience that isn't quite like anything you've seen before.

Best Digital Game — Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure by Alex Blechman

The award for best digital game goes to this short, sweet, simple, and above all entertaining take on Robert Frost's famous poem. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure tasks you with jazzing up the verse by subbing in some new material to entertain a modern gaming audience. Give it a try, or two or three...

Best Adaptation — God of Vengeance by jrgoldb

This award goes to the game that most faithfully and meaningfully adapted its source material, carrying its original intent forth into a new medium. God of Vengeance, based on the 1923 Yiddish language play of the same name, is an analog storytelling game that puts players in the main roles from the play and provides an interesting mechanical framework for improvising scenes and exploring the themes of a work they might otherwise have never encountered.

Best Remix — Will You Do The Fandango? by Lari Assmuth

This award goes to the game that made the best combined use of multiple public domain works. Will You Do The Fandango? starts with the 1923 film Scaramouche, but then draws on the whole world of Commedia dell'Arte and the mechanics from games like Apocalypse World and Lady Blackbird. The result is a high-energy tabletop roleplaying game, complete with dice and stats, in which a troupe of traveling players tour revolutionary France engaging in bombastic drama and romance — with printable masquerade masks to boot!

Best Deep Cut — Not a Fish by J. Walton

This award is for the best use of an obscure or unexpected source that doesn't appear on the typical roundup lists of works entering the public domain, and the cuts don't get much deeper than Not a Fish: a game based on a pair of 1923 science journal articles about Amphioxus fisheries in China. Like the jigsaw puzzles that inspired the mechanics, the game starts out seeming jumbled, but it quickly starts to resolve into an exploration of social and political themes you might not be expecting from the subject matter.

Best Visuals (Tie!) — Chimneys and Tulips by litrouke, and The Garden of God by DreadRoach

There wasn't a single stand-out winner for the best visuals category, and understandably so — one month is scarcely enough time to create or assemble a game's worth of stunning graphics. Instead, the award for best visuals goes to two browser-based submissions which, while they have their limitations, certainly caught our eye.

Chimneys and Tulips is a creative arrangement of four poems by E. E. Cummings, with a focus on beautiful minimalist design. Though the gameplay is somewhat lacking, a lot of work and vision went into the colorful style in which the works are presented, and while the interactive elements may be simple, they aren't arbitrary. Fans of poetry, and of typography, will find plenty to explore.

The Garden of God is a short narrative experience based on the novel of the same name by H. De Vere Stacpoole. It's built in RPG Maker MV, and most of the visuals are stock sprites and graphics from that tool — but a lot of thought and effort went into how they were used. The game has multiple unique settings and maps, and well-choreographed scripted scenes with attention to background detail.

All the winners in all categories will receive their choice of a copy of our public domain card game CIA: Collect It All, or one of our copyright-themed t-shirts from Teespring. We'll be reaching out to all the winners on their games' Itch pages, so if you see your game listed here, keep an eye on your incoming comments!

Thanks again to everyone who submitted a game — there are lots of entries worth checking out in addition to the winners. And thanks again to our panel of judges:

• Whitney “Strix” Beltrán
• Nicky Case
• Eric Goldman
• Charlie Hall
• Carolyn Homer
• Daphne Keller
• Albert Kong
• J Li
• Mark Lemley
• Randy Lubin
• Mike Masnick
• Jason Morningstar
• Rebecca Tushnet
• April Kit Walsh

We'll likely be back with another game next year when, if all goes according to plan, the public domain will continue to grow!

Filed Under: 1923, board games, copyright, game jam, games, public domain, public domain game jam, rpg, video games

Wrestler Booker T Sues Activision For Copyright Infringement Over Fairly Generic Character Depiction

from the no-bro dept

It's old hat by now to point out that on matters of copyright far too many people are unaware of the nuances of the law as to what constitutes infringement and what doesn't. While this is generally true, it's all the more so when it comes to how copyright covers specific characters or settings. For instance, George Lucas may have a copyright claim on the specific character of Darth Vader, but he most certainly does not have any claim to the more generic black-armored space-magician with a laser sword and a bad attitude. Copyright covers expression, in other words, not mere ideas.

Which brings us to ex-WWE wrestler Booker T and his lawsuit against Activision over a G.I. Bro character he created and a character in Black Ops 4.

Booker T. Huffman has filed a lawsuit against video game publisher Activision for allegedly stealing his “G.I Bro” character in the Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 video game.

Huffman filed a lawsuit today against Activision Publishing, Inc, Activision Blizzard, Inc., and Major League Gaming Corp.

The lawsuit alleges that Booker T’s character G.I Bro was copied by the Black Ops character David “Prophet” Wilkes. Booker T used the G.I Bro character in the 90s as a professional wrestler, and also created a comic book based on the character in 2015.

You can read the entire filing below, but I will tell you right up front that this isn't a strong case. Booker T is asserting copyright infringement over a character that does not share a name with his, does not share a backstory with his, and does not exist in the same setting as his. Instead, it appears the only thing the two characters do share is that both are African American gunslingers in combat gear with long hair. Seriously, that's about it. The filing itself uses these side by side images to demonstrate the "blatant copying" that has occurred.

If you think there is any kind of unique identifier in Activision's image on the right that somehow makes it a clear copy of Booker T's character, you're a crazy person. Again, to put it bluntly, it's just an African American guy with long hair in combat gear. Complicating Booker T's suit further, this is an established character in the Black Ops ethos, with this supposedly infringing depiction being simply some imagery around when Prophet was younger. The character is Prophet, full stop. It's not G.I. Bro at all and nobody is going to think otherwise, except apparently for Booker T and whatever lawyers he convinced to file this lawsuit.

And none of that even touches Booker T's own character's name, a clear homage and reference to G.I. Joe. One wonders if Hasbro wants to get involved at this point, given the stink that's being made over intellectual property rights.

Filed Under: black ops 4, booker t, characters, copyright, g.i. bro, video games
Companies: activision

Sony: We Are Totally Open For Crossplay, Game Developers: No, You Totally Are Not

from the cross-purposes dept

It's a really dumb saga that has gone on for far too long, but Sony has built for itself a public history of not allowing gamers to cross-play multiplayer games on their Playstations with players on other consoles. This is all an attempt to get Playstation owners to convince their friends to also buy Playstations so that they can game together, which is exactly the kind of protectionist hardball that makes Sony, you know, Sony. The backlash against Sony last summer was bad enough that Microsoft and Nintendo, rivals in the console space, decided to put out joint advertisements together along with a social media campaign essentially trolling Sony over the issue, while pointing out to gamers worldwide that owners of Nintendo and Xbox consoles very much could play with one another.

In one of the all-time underwhelming responses to a PR crisis in the history of gaming, Sony did enable crossplay... for exactly two games. Fortnite and Rocket League have crossplay enabled, but literally nothing else. Which made it somewhat baffling that the Chairman of Sony Interactive managed to claim in a recent interview that the lack of crossplay at this point was all the developers' fault.

“People keep saying, ‘Why doesn’t Sony allow more people to have it,’” Sony’s Shawn Layden told Game Informer. “All it takes is for publishers and developers who wish to permission it. As ever, just work with your PlayStation account manager, and they will walk you through the steps that we’ve learned through our partnership with Epic on how this works. I don’t believe right now there is any gating factor on that. I think they’re open to make proposals, because the Fortnite thing worked pretty well.”

It's a striking claim in many ways. First, the inclusion of a phrase like "as ever" must surely be infuriating to any developer or gamer who knows the history of crossplay on Sony's hardware. It's not "as ever." At best, it's "as very, very recently." Second, the claim makes no sense. Developers and publishers across the spectrum have managed to get crossplay enabled on Xbox and Nintendo hardware, but the claim is that they've just been too lazy to do so with Sony? All while they're screaming that they want their games to be crossplay enabled? Come on.

And it's not just me saying so. Layden's comments were met with immediate backlash from developers.

Finn Brice, the CEO of Chucklefish, which developed and published the recent Advance Wars-inspired hit Wargroove, took issue with Layden’s characterization in a thread about the interview on the gaming forum ResetEra.

“We made many requests for crossplay (both through our account manager and directly with higher ups) all the way up until release month,” Brice wrote. “We were told in no uncertain terms that it was not going to happen.”

Wargroove is currently available, with cross-play, on Switch, Xbox One, and PC. The game is slated to launch later this year on PlayStation 4. Brice added that while it might be more complicated from a policy standpoint on PlayStation’s part, for Chucklefish, implementing cross-play is as easy as flipping a switch, something people have speculated about ever since Fortnite maker Epic Games accidentally enabled cross-play between Xbox One and PS4 back in September of 2017.

In other words, Sony is Sonying all over this. Why in the world this kind of comment should be thought to do anything other than anger both gamers and game developers alike is beyond me. Blame developers for your own protectionist behavior that refuses what your own customers want? That's ballsy, even for Sony.

Filed Under: crossplay, playstation, video games
Companies: sony