Category: News

Star Control designers Paul Reiche III and Robert Frederick Ford have defended their decision to issue a DMCA takedown against Star Control: Origins, which resulted in the title being pulled from sale earlier this week.

Origins developer Stardock has been engaged in a lengthy legal battle with Reiche and Ford over the trademarks and copyrights to the Star Control franchise, and criticized the duo for choosing to “bypass” the legal system “by issuing vague DMCA take-down notices to Steam and GOG.”

“We attempted to get a preliminary art injunction to prevent them from issuing more false DMCA take down notices. Unfortunately, the court ruled that it wasn’t the courts’ place to intervene in the area of DMCAs. Thus, here we are.” wrote Stardock on the Steam forums. 

“To my knowledge, never in the history of our industry has anyone attempted to use the DMCA system to take down a shipping game before. For those not familiar with copyright law, you cannot copyright ideas, individual or short phrases, concepts, mechanics, or game designs.” 

With Stardock having said its piece, Reiche and Ford have now shared their version of events, and reiterated their view that Star Control: Origins is “substantially similar” to their work on Star Control II. 

Starting from the top, the designers confirmed they agreed to refrain from serving new DMCA notices while a judge looked at an injunction filed by Stardock, but that after the studio’s motion was denied, they had every right to push forward with their DMCA takedown against Origins. 

“As you might guess, we are going to continue defending our copyrights against what we feel and contend in the lawsuit is infringement by Stardock, so we served new DMCA notices late last week,” commented Reiche and Ford.

“[Stardock CEO] Brad Wardell has said repeatedly ‘you can’t copyright a word’ which seems to mean that that if you break down creative work into its component parts, those component parts are too trivial to be protected.

“Of course that’s crazy. Copyright protects original literary and artistic works that are simply specific combination of words, or images, or other content.”

The pair also emphasized the importance of understanding what Stardock actually purchased when it acquired the ‘Star Control Franchise’ in Atari’s bankruptcy auction. Indeed, they claim Star Control only actually bought the registration to the trademark ‘Star Control,’ and the copyright to the original parts of Star Control 3.

“The bankruptcy paperwork was very specific that anything not listed was excluded. Not Star Control, Star Control II, the unreleased Star Control 4, packaging art — none of that was included in the auction,” they added. 

Getting to the nitty gritty, the duo also claim Stardock received a copy of their 1998 contract with Star Control 3 developer Accolade so it could understand the exact terms under which material had been licensed.

That contract apparently didn’t grant any additional property to Stardock, but the studio now claims it holds all of Accolade’s rights and has also applied for “tons of trademarks” on the names of aliens Riche and Ford invented in Star Control and Star Control II. 

What’s more, Reiche and Ford also assert that Star Control: Origins has copied certain gameplay and design elements from Star Control II, thus directly infringing upon their original work. 

“Besides the evidence of infringement identified in our most recent filings with the court, let’s compare the expression in a very limited part of the gameplay — interstellar travel. One would presume that Stardock would either make entirely new gameplay for Origins or base it upon the original parts of SC3,” they wrote, referencing the comparison table pictured below.

“It’s clear to us that Stardock chose to make Origins substantially similar to Star Control II instead of using the original material they purchased in Star Control 3. We don’t claim to have a copyright on all interstellar travel, but we do have a copyright on the specific way we expressed interstellar travel in Star Control II. 

“We see many such examples in Star Control: Origins where its expression is substantially similar to and/or derivative of our copyright-protected work, without our permission.”

In this GDC 2012 session, Bungie composers Brandi House and Marty O’Donnell discuss insights uncovered through user research about how people feel in response to music in games.

The duo describe the methods they used, and share the data they gathered using a variety of audio and video examples.

It was an insightful talk that’s definitely still worth watching, so developers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to do so now that it’s freely available on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent company Informa

Bethesda Softworks has resolved a lawsuit it brought against Behaviour Interactive and Warner Bros. last June for copyright infringement, breach of contract and unfair competition. 

Bethesda released a statement earlier today claiming it had reached an agreement with Behaviour, although no further information was given.

“Bethesda Softworks and Behaviour Interactive jointly announced today that the parties have amicably resolved the lawsuit Bethesda brought against Behaviour and others related to the Fallout Shelter and Westworld mobile games,” the statement reads.

This comes after Bethesda accused Warner Bros. and Behaviour back in June 2018 for copyright infringement, misappropriation of trade secrets, deceptive business practices, and unfair competition with the release of a Westworld mobile game. 

Bethesda took legal action after pointing out Westworld’s apparent similarities to Fallout Shelter, accusing the former of copying “the same or highly similar game design, art style, animations, features, and other gameplay elements” as Fallout Shelter.

Warner Bros. and Behaviour followed up with a statement shortly after the complaint was filed, saying that the accusations made against them were baseless.

Gamasutra has reached out to Bethesda for any additional comments, and this piece will be updated should one be received. 

Video games now account for more than half of the entire UK entertainment market, according to a new report from the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA). 

The UK games industry was worth £3.86 billion ($4.85 billion) in 2018, which is more than double the combined £3.67 billion ($4.62 billion) value of the country’s video and music industries. 

Although the games market is now the biggest in UK entertainment, year-over-year sales of physical console and PC titles actually fell by 2.8 percent, while digital sales increased by 12.5 percent. 

That upswing means digital sales generated 80.1 percent of the UK’s video game revenue in 2018, although a lot of the biggest selling titles — such as FIFA 19, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Black Ops 4 — still did well at retail.

Overall, the ERA believes games came out on top because of the “sheer scale” of the industry, and noted that the video game market has now more than doubled in value since 2007.

“The games industry has been incredibly effective in taking advantage of the potential of digital technology to offer new and compelling forms of entertainment,” commented ERA CEO, Kim Bayley. “Despite being the youngest of our three sectors, it is now by far the biggest.”

You can find out more by checking out the ERA’s full report right here. We’ve also taken the liberty of highlighting the UK’s best selling physical console games of 2018 below. 

In 2018, I experienced one of my biggest shifts in video gaming behavior over the past decade. Overall, the industry is going through some interesting changes with the introduction of Epic and Discord’s game marketplaces, and an explosion of games available on Steam and new storefronts. Personally, it was a big change of me, because I moved in with my fiancée, got married, and overall had less time for my old gaming habits. Instead of playing mostly new games, I’ve played a mix of new and old games over the past year. Here are some of the trends in my gameplay habits that I noticed in 2018.

More Casual

I started working for Zynga in June, and shortly before then I started exploring mobile games such as Words with Friends 2. My commute also changed over the past year, and I have more time commuting on the train that I can now spend playing games. One of the genres that I’ve kept on my phone throughout the year is match-3 titles, including Crazy Cake Swap, Wonka’s World of Candy, and Candy Crush Friends Saga. This is the first year that I really got into mobile gaming, and I’ve even started playing some of these games outside of my commute.

Another trend in my gaming habits that I’ve noticed in the past year is playing games on easier modes. Since I have less time to play games, I want to get through games quicker, rather than constantly replaying sections of a game. I found myself setting the difficulty level on Wolfenstein II to easy mode, so that I could make progress through the game more quickly. I still enjoy challenge in games, but like the ability to take shortcuts to progress the story.

More Experimental

Procedural content generation (PCG) has already seen huge success with level generation in MineCraft, and weapon creation in Borderlands. But this year was the first time that I experienced a game using PCG for creating high-fidelity 3D levels. I started playing the Descenders game preview on Xbox One, and really enjoyed the feel of the generated levels. While the early game levels became repetitive after a bit, the later zones in the game added enough terrain configurations to keep the levels diverse and interesting.

I also tried out some new genres of games this year, including Gone Home. This game has been out for awhile, but I finally took the time to play it, after downloading it when it was offered through Xbox Live. I enjoyed the pace of the game and the focus on narrative, and it aligned well with my focus on more casual gameplay experiences.

More Subscriptions

As mentioned with Gone Home, I’ve purchased fewer games directly over the past year and have taken advantage of more of the games available through Xbox Live and PS Plus. One of my favorites that I replayed this year was Skulls of the Shogun, where I played through the DLC content for the first time.

Over the past year, I’ve kept my number of gaming subscriptions steady, while decreasing my number of video streaming subscriptions. EA’s been exploring subscription services for a few years now with EA Access and Origin Access, and Xbox Game Pass is shaping up to be a great service as well.

More Classics

I’ve also been replaying some of favorite games over the past year. Remastered editions, such as Dark Souls, provided a great nudge to encourage me to revisit these classic titles. Between remastered titles, Xbox backwards compatibility, and classic console releases, there’s several options for going back and enjoying older games. This is a trend in my gameplay habits I blogged about back in 2015, and it’s been great seeing more availability of classic titles.