Bioware Release Neverwinter Nights Beta Toolset

Max writes "Bioware, the company who have been working on Neverwinter Nights for many years, have recently released a beta version of the NWN toolset for all to download. The toolset is a brilliant feature of NWN, as it allows players to create and script their own custom made adventures. This beta version is limited, but designed to give players an insight in to the massive customisation available in the game. The file itself is 241mb and can be downloaded from Bioware " Update: 05/19 04:10 GMT by M : Zed Pobre submitted an important note concerning the EULA of this toolset, appended below. Update: 05/19 14:16 GMT by M : Derek French of Bioware has a response below. I respectfully disagree with him; I've just read the SDK EULA's for Starcraft and Half-life, and neither of these would permit the company to redistribute your mods for their commercial gain, while Bioware's would. Update: 05/20 05:16 GMT by M : Bioware is going to take another look at the EULA.

Zed Pobre writes "Careful review of the EULA of the Neverwinter Nights Beta Toolset reveals the following clause:

• Section 4(b):

  "By distributing or permitting the distribution of any of your Modules, you hereby grant back to INFOGRAMES and BIOWARE an irrevocable royalty-free right to use and distribute them by any means. Infogrames or BIOWARE may at any time and in its sole discretion revoke your right to make your Modules publicly available."

This is more or less the same as if a company producing a compiler wrote into the EULA that by distributing any program compiled with that compiler, the company would permanently get the rights to do whatever they wanted with that program, including reselling it for profit and then forbidding you to publish it yourself.

Derek French, the Assistant Producer for Bioware, confirmed that this section of the EULA is not going to change for the final release. Although he noted in the same message that similar clauses have been used by other companies providing tools for users to create their own content, NWN has a much greater scope than any of them by far, and it's now a profoundly bad idea for someone who wants to keep control of their writing, characters, or game ideas , or use those elements elsewhere, to make a NWN module using those elements publically available.

This kind of clause falls just short of "Bioware Owns Anything You Make", since if they want to sell a module you created themselves, the clause even allows them to forbid you from distributing your original version for any reason. The sole comfort in this is that the clause apparantly does not allow them to make a derivative work of your module, so it would have to be distributed "as is" -- but if the module contained enough "objectionable" material that they wouldn't want to take it for themselves, they could still forbid the owner from distributing it.

Once again, it seems that companies are only against piracy as long as it's their material being pirated. If they can pirate some individual's material by throwing an unreadable EULA up for a second at install time, it's perfectly fine.

The full forum thread discussing this can be found here."

Comments

Greetings from BioWare

[Derek French]

Hi all. I just wanted to jump in here and try and clear up some of the confusion.

First, read your EULAs for Quake 3, Half-Life, StarCraft, etc. (other games that allow you to create content). All of them say the same thing that we are saying. Our EULA is nothing new. They must be written this way to protect both the companies involved and the end users. I am serious. Read the EULAs of those other games.

Every time a new game comes out, someone actually reads the EULA and the spectres of corporate exploitation rears its head. Its just not happening. id, Blizzard, Valve, none of these companies have ripped off their fans. Why? Because its suicide. And we aren't doing it either.

Babbster - no, you cannot use your friend's novel nor on Star Wars, or any other existing licenced or copyrighted content for the basis of a module. This is prohibited by the EULA. Your friend can create a module based on his novel. CoreyGH has it right.

Some other comments:

Windows only. Really? Then I guess I better shut down this Neverwinter Nights Linux dedicated server that I am playing on right now...

Toolset is Windows only. Borland was supposed to have Builder for Linux done a long time ago and that was what we were going to use for Linux. We use Builder for Windows for the Toolset. The Linux Toolset is just not happening right at this moment.

The distribution statement means that you cannot charge anyone to play Neverwinter Nights. Neither for modules, nor for server access. This isn't a MMORPG.

And yes, our game is designed such that the end users do NOT need to download the modules in order to play on the server. No matter what module the server is running (well, pretty much).

Re:Greetings from BioWare

[Sheetrock]

Hello, and thank you for coming to Slashdot to address our concerns. I appreciate that you take enough interest in your work to come into the community and talk with us, and I hope that you'll take my comment to heart without offense as none is intended.

I've been quite concerned lately with the direction EULAs have been taking, and with some of the decisions being made at the leading companies in the game industry in particular. I would like to address two provisions in your EULA that could perpetuate or create new restrictions on players and hopefully persuade you to reconsider them.

One thing that troubles me is that your company is attempting to establish editorial control over the content users might wish to create and distribute. How am I or anyone else to know whether or not a package we labor over for days (to release for free to your other customers, natch) is going to meet with your company's standards? What risk does your company really incur if it permits customers generate whatever they desire with the toolset (and deal with the law themselves if they violate it)? More importantly, what liabilities has your company taken on now that it has more or less declared itself the policeman for all content generated with its tools? I know that the ISPs lobbied their asses off to avoid that kind of responsibility; are you sure you guys want it?

The second thing that concerns me is that with this EULA your company is attempting to create rights for itself to its customers' work. It's suspicious even if you only intend to use it to create a 'best-of' pack to distribute with Neverwinter Nights when sales of the original slow down (and, hey, I personally think that it'd be pretty cool to have happen with my work, but I'd at least appreciate an e-mail -- the Linux folk aren't demanding a copy of your software just because you're running it on their server, are they?) I'm comfortable with the idea that you don't want me or anyone else to sell modules I create for a profit, as I understand you'd probably prefer to license your engine for such things, but the statements in the EULA are excessively broad if this is all your company really wants to accomplish.

Whether or not you actually intend to exert this control, the perceived threat in this clause is enough that I wouldn't risk creating content for your game, and given the impact I believe it will have on the amount of quality content available for download I'd probably have second thoughts about buying it to begin with. I certainly don't think that any of you are out to screw us, but then again I never thought that Blizzard would punish their loyal fans either. I recognize that overbroad EULAs have become one of the hallmarks of the game industry from the big players, but I sincerely hope that, as an expression of goodwill to those of us who plan to line up at the stores to spend our hard-earned money on your game the minute it leaves the truck, you will have the courage to break with that way of thinking enough to rewrite the EULA to protect our interests with the same enthusiasm as you have protected your own.

Solution: write an Open Source toolset

[Telcontar]

Since the toolset is Windows only, this seems to be the obvious way to go. Reverse engineer the file format(s), write an editor, use that editor to create the mods.
I am sure this is eventually going to happen anyway, bad EULA or not.