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How Videogames Help Fund the Arms Industry
FhnuZoag writes "Eurogamer has an expose of the shady world of games developers licensing guns. From the article: '"We must be paid a royalty fee — either a one-time payment or a percentage of sales, all negotiable. Typically, a licensee pays between 5 per cent to 10 per cent retail price for the agreement. [...] We want to know explicitly how the rifle is to be used, ensuring that we are shown in a positive light... Such as the 'good guys' using the rifle," says [Barett Rifles'] Vaughn.'"
It's shady because the games publishers are (perhaps understandably) evasive about the amount of money they are funnelling into the weapons industry, and are working under direct conditions to portray guns in a positive manner so as to encourage gun sales, even as they claim to be non-political and not pushing violence.
5-10% of retail sales is a *lot*.
They also sell to private gun shops, which the federal government orders to purposely sell to Mexican drug runners and their straw purchasers.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
So there's a copyrighted look, a trademarked name, and a patented design. Players demand real brand-name stuff in their games, so developers deliver by licensing real brand-name stuff in their games. To do this legally means getting a license.
What's so shady about that?
So, read the actual article.
The article's arguments, for the "TLDR" crowd, amount to this: .50; it was my favorite gun & skin from Counter-strike 1).
1. Like the candy cigarettes before them, the depiction of realistic guns--especially with the real names attached--amounts to advertisement towards a target population of young individuals, to influence them to purchase the real thing. They provide some anecdotal evidence that it works. As a personal anecdote, I know that it's worked on me (I own a BB gun that's a model of the USP
2. The "shady" part is that the game companies would, seemingly universally, prefer not to talk publicly about any of this (i.e., that there's any ongoing collaboration, licensing, or even two-way discussion between them and gun manufacturers). This is likely a socially-perceived "negative" topic, and therefore discussing it would likely negatively impact sales by casting their companies in a negative light.
Like candy cigarettes, any advertising of an inherently dangerous/deadly product towards an adolescent target audience probably should be carefully scrutinized, regulated, or eliminated.
This article does a great job pointing out the 'shadiness' of the NRA's about-face in participating in the video games industry, then turning around and declaring it the root of all evil.
The NRA does not represent the firearms industry; it represents firearms owners. They're not the "gun lobby", they're the "gun owners' lobby". The NRA therefore has nothing to do with gun manufacturers' licensing of realistic guns for video games. Based on Wayne LaPierre's recent statements, the NRA's leadership is most likely opposed to this practice.
Van Halen did that out of legitimate safety concerns.
http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp
The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen's contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide an easy way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read (and complied with). As Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth explained in his autobiography: Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We'd pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn't support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren't big enough to move the gear through.
The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . ." This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: "There will be no brown M&M's in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract. Guaranteed you'd run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.