Game Developers at the GDC have a RANT...

[savage]

Here is a link to some Game Developers at the GDC having a RANT.
http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonde...he_house_.html
It seems the industry is in a bit of turmoil and the people who love making the games are not happy at all. A call to game developer revolution perhaps.

[Sly]

As someone actively employed in the game industry and having experienced most of the ups and downs that are now getting a lot of publicity, I can agree with most of those rants.

[WILL]

Yeah the gaming industry is deinitely a different animal from what it used to be years gone past. But is it better or worse than what it was like in the beginning? Take the first generation of console videogaming systems (Intellivision, Colico and Atari) the video game industry was treated more like a toy industry since everyone was so new to the idea as software as a tangable comodity so it was just assumed that it could be treated as such. Much like today companies are still trying to patten and hold whatever they can as their own.

Look at emulators, classic videogame remakes and just about any other peice of software that can recreate characteristics or features of past software or proprarity.


Reasons why things, quite possibly may be getting out of hand:

:arrow: Marvel's lawsuit against City of Heroes
:arrow: Nintendo's war on any remade games or emulators of their past consoles
:arrow: followed by organizations that has in the past threatedned legal action on creators of hobbiest programmer groups that make even freeware remakes of games that fall under their protection, names fail me at this time.
:arrow: There was even a lawsuit against 3D game companies from a company called Tektronics or something stating that 3D graphics on a 2D screen was pattened by them. Oh, come on! :roll:

There is a serious cause for complaints, I agree. But it's going to take more than a few legal battles and raging grannies to change it. It falls on the game distributors, marketing companies, and big production companies to practice the art of 'fair play' and level the playing field a bit more. If there is no competition then the market suffers, this is common business knowlage.

Software as a comodity is very different from selling hardware or other such things. You have to treat it differently and you have to know the difference, otherwise you're lost.

[Sly]

:arrow: There was even a lawsuit against 3D game companies from a company called Tektronics or something stating that 3D graphics on a 2D screen was pattened by them. Oh, come on! :roll:

TY the Tasmanian Tiger was one of the games named in that lawsuit. I have been involved in the defense of that lawsuit because I was lead programmer on TY. Well, I don't have to personally attend the courtroom, but I have had to prepare responses to questions from the defense lawyers.