Legal Issues Within the Gaming Industry

There are 2 major legal issues that disrupt the games industry. Industry practices and consumer practices.

Industry Practices

Many people may not notice that there are actually quite a few problems within the companies that make games and the industry as a whole. 

One very good example is Studios 38, Curt Schilling the founder of the company was given $75 Million by the state of Rhode Island to move state and create 450 new jobs. You can already tell what will happen next. Him making the biggest mistake by focusing on 2 projects at the same time made the company unorganized and after wasting all the money and not gaining anything from it all he has left 150+ workers that moved cross country to the new Rhode Island were left with no money and no job.


(Picture of Studio 38's game Amalur)

It is common for developers to not pay their workers for whatever reason. Most workers that work in the games industry are forced to work overtime sometimes with no extra pay. Many take lots of money away from their employees for whatever reason it may be. A good example of this is the developers behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. The studio heads were fired by Activision after discovering they were holding meetings with other publishers later finding out the reason is that they haven't been paid $500 million worth of cash. Of course they make up lies to cover this up.

Another problem is copyright issues within the industry for example weapons that are similar to another game or the game name is similar to another game. This may sound silly but the companies are completely serious about it. They will bring in law suits just to set it right.

There is one last small problem with the industry's practice but this one is easily avoided. Some games tend to be so bad that they go against the laws of the government and some games are rejected for this as they refuse to change their game content.

Consumer Practices

Piracy is a huge problem as a whole for our society but this also hits the games industry too as well as all the others. We all have done this once for whatever reason it is illegal. It's almost obvious why it is a problem because the developers and producers are getting absolutely nothing for this. This is a quote of a developer “[We] think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country three months after the U.S. release and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty."

It's not always the consumer's fault for pirating, it is possible that some countries do not sell the game or that it is released late or that there are far too much censoring that it makes the game boring. 

There are ways to get around this problem, there are many games that are free that make more money that games that sell. The reason being is that in a free game anyone are able to access it and get it for free and if they simply add a add-on that you have to pay for (optional) then people go absolutely crazy! I speak this from personal experience.

I am mad for free MMOs, I will not play an MMO if it's not free simply because they are just as good as the ones you pay for. Also I can choose if I want to buy the add-on or not and I am still playing the game populating it and most definitely if someone asks me what I am doing I answer them,"This cool MMO" and when they go up and search for that game out of curiosity, that is another possible player for the company to milk money out of. Their strategy is amazing and they would never have pirating issues.

MapleStory is one of the biggest and most popular MMORPGs that have been on the internet for over 5 years now. Compared to all the new MMOs, MapleStory is now slowing fading in the game's industry.

This brings us another problem though. Most MMOs have gifting systems and it is possible to trade in-game money for add-ons. That is an issue as players are selling items that are not theirs, but the question is who owns the Cash Shop item. Producers believe it is their item but players believe it is theirs if they pay for it. So that is a confusing question for both industry and consumer.

There is another problem for the consumers is jailbreaking. This is when a machine is modified and the user has a lot more control over it. There are reason for people to do this, good and bad, harmful and harmless. The PS3 had the option to install Linux but they took that away after seeing it was possible for consumers to pirate games, this enraged the users and forced them to jailbreak their PS3 just to get their optional feature back not for torrenting games but getting it back for what they paid for, as you know jailbreaking consoles leads to people download pirating games even if the people who jailbreak their console has no intention of pirating or any further illegal actions, their action alone of jailbreaking is enough.

SOPA/PIPA

Many of you have heard or seen this somewhere on the internet, it was a huge act to stop piracy by stopping websites like megaupload to shutdown due to piracy problems. This of course did not stop people pirating and the only thing that was lost was some people's work that they upload on there that they lose forever. That is all because SOPA shut their website down including all of the legal resources.