Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Why would you bother calling it by its real world name?
Just call it something else and don't pay.
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?
More Twoson than Cupertino
I'm guessing Borderlands doesn't have this issue.
That they're licensing a company's depictions of a legal product? Can you explain how this would be different than licensing cars, planes, soft drinks, sports teams, comic book characters or anything else that goes into a video game? What exactly is new about this story that isn't already well known?
This article is pure flamebait. Slashdot should be better than this, but I guess the website traffic must be trending down.
I didn't. But then, I don't really have an issue with the arms industry so I don't care. Hell, my tax dollars fund the arms industry. Not a damn thing I could do about it even if I cared.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Why is this shady? If McDonalds allowed the use of their franchise in GTA, wouldn't they want a say in how it is used?
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
Yes. A relative of mine works for a company that wanted to do a racing sim and they eventually gave up because of the nightmare that was trying to get permission to use real cars like Porsche or Corvette.
if you are so hung up on morals, don't play games where violence is the core of the game
I would imagine that this situation exists for games featuring cars, airplanes, or any other product that has a corporate brand identity. But a headline decrying "Video Games Fund the Automotive Industry" just doesn't have any punch.
The use of real items in a fictional context is a very gray area in Law. The idea that any manufactured item requires a license when it appears in a film, book or game is plainly a nonsense. Consider an urban scene in a movie. Within seconds, tens of thousands of manufactured items are visible, each with a product name and a company that produced them. Do you REALLY think the fact that these items are onscreen requires the produces to seek permission, or gain licenses?
Does this situation even change just because the character in the movies says "do you want a Coke?", or "I'm going to use the Hoover?" (and I'm not talking about product placement, which would be the OTHER reason to mention brand names).
Dirty, corrupt Hollywood lawyers have worked over the years to leverage an artificially created 'uncertainty', and now shill sites like this with the idea that anything 'real' used in a film or game must be paid for (with lawyers taking a VERY nice slice of the pie). The truth is the opposite, except under very rare circumstances.
In a game, where the gameplay involves the use of modern weapons, there is absolutely no reason why the people that produce the game need permission from the real life weapon manufacturers. If the weapon were shown in a bad light (say, by malfunctioning, or having sub-standard performance), the manufacturing MIGHT be able to take legal action, but even in this case success in the courts would be most uncertain.
The fantasy of mandatory license requirements was built by said Hollywood lawyers in a very crafty way. Most countries pervert their legal system to allow 'sponsorship' of sporting events. Corrupt politicians create obscene exceptions for the people that run major sports (the Olympics and F1 Motor racing are particularly egregious examples).
Now, many computer games from the second wave of consoles were 'sports' games, and pretty quickly these 'sports' games moved from the generic (play football, play basketball, etc) to the specific (play official FIFA football, play official NBA basketball, etc). Official sports are covered by exclusive licenses permitted by exceptions to the Law made possible by the actions of corrupt politicians.
However, it was with RACING games where all this came to a head. Official racing commonly involves certain models of car. But what if a computer game didn't pay for an official license, but still used the same model of car? The 'Hollywood' lawyers spotted an opportunity, and suggested to the car companies that their product could ONLY appear in a game if they gave permission (got paid). This represents a MASSIVE distortion of the law. Even if a game mentions the name of a car, there is no mechanism in law suggesting the game producers should have to pay to use the car in their game.
Manufactured goods are NOT works of art, or protected IP when it comes to their visual portrayal in media. The Law actually makes this point clear in most nations of the world. However, the biggest game companies pay large amounts of money to buy the rights to many events, so they tend to see the perversion of licensing as a weapon against would-be competitors.
Most game companies now feel obliged to produce generic versions of items representative of manufactured goods, and to name these items with fictional product names. If the REAL names and shapes are used, the game company feels obliged to form a relationship with the manufacturer (which may actually involve money, goods or services flowing toward the publishers- emulating sports sponsorship). The computer game "Battlefield 3" (a putrid sequel to a once class IP) actually chose to be a propaganda storefront for Obama's wars of aggression, and got into trouble because of its close link with weapons companies actively promoting violence across the planet in real life.
Computer games don't FUND the arms industry, but they do PROMOTE the military industrial complex of the West. The recent attack on a gas facility in a remote Saharan desert location within Algeria could have
why not? for years car makers wouldnt allow "real damage" or in some cases any damage shown on their cars in racing games. How is this any different?
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Van Halen used to have a clause in their performance contracts that they must be provided with a bowl of MM's with the brown ones picked out. What does 'fairness' have to do with a legal civil contract?
love is just extroverted narcissism
So the government botched a sting operation called Fast and Furious and you're going to frame them as if it's standard operating procedure?
// No, they did not - In 2009, they passed an "omnibus spending bill". Spending approval does not equal a budget, not by a long shot.
Only the "botched" part. The rest suggests that our government had more of a clue than normal.
/ Still waiting on that 1998 budget...
Bushmaster's parent company, Cerberus Capital, has decided to divest itself of Bushmaster and the other arms companies under the Freedom Group umbrella. This was ostensibly done in response to the Newtown shooting, i.e. on account the illegal actions undertaken by a deranged boy, and not even one of their customers, with the use of one of their products. Certain segments of the public blame the company itself.
Imagine for a moment that the same company had knowingly allowed its products to be used in video games for nefarious purposes. Imagine the game was like Carmageddon from the nineties and you could get extra points for shooting hookers. Or, more likely, you could use the gun when acting as terrorists in some C-Strike like bombing scenario. And then that same gun with the same brand was used in real life to do harm to innocents. What would the repercussions be then? Some will say that the requirement the gun only be used by the 'good guys' is PR or propaganda, and they're partly right. But there's another side to this. A company who can be blamed for the misuse of its products has to try all the harder to defend itself and its image from association with that misuse.
As long as we're whipping out anecdotes as evidence, I've played lots of gun games but I didn't actually get interested in the real life versions at all until I was invited to shoot trap.
I think that positive light angle is probably overblown. I mean, it's not like the bad guys aren't also armed, or that the game will keep you from dying because you're holding a magic Colt branded M4, or the game prevents you from shooting unarmed civilians while equipping a Remington but will let you do it if you equip a Beretta.
What they don't want you doing is what any other brand wouldn't like you doing: trashing it. They wouldn't necessarily want a licensee pointing to the Bushmaster logo and saying it resembles a guy in a hoodie on fire (it does to me! It's sort of like that FedEx arrow, once you see it you can't not see it), or showing a bomber plane with the Winchester logo drop a nuke on DC.
I'm pretty sure if Square Enix was planning to disembowel Disney characters in Kingdom Hearts, they similarly would not have been allowed to license it. Calling such actions "propaganda" dilutes the power of the word.
More Twoson than Cupertino
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.
The Arms Industry helps game makers by letting them, for a price, use the name of their product.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
I seem to recall a rumour that they got rid of the damage in the Need For Speed series because the can manufacturers didn't like seeing their cars dented up and performing poorly after a crash. I haven't played the games recently, but the last one I played and liked was NFS IV, because it had real damage, and you didn't have the computer cars sideswiping you to run you off the track, because their car would get damaged as well. It was really fun to play a racing game where you would almost garaunteed end up losing if you crashed.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So the government botched a sting operation called Fast and Furious and you're going to frame them as if it's standard operating procedure?
Only the "botched" part. The rest suggests that our government had more of a clue than normal.
Oh, I don't know. Somehow the FBI can figure out how to catch a terrorist who wants to bomb a building without letting them actually build a working bomb. Yet the ATF couldn't figure out how to catch an illegal buyer without actually letting them get a working weapon?
More Twoson than Cupertino
Oh please! Call it what it was, which several agents even called it, a "false flag operation" to try to build a connection where none existed of American guns going to Mexican dope dealers so they could try to push tougher gun laws HERE.
And its not even the first time the US government has been busted pulling a false flag, 58,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese died thanks to the false flag Gulf of Tonkin incident, and just like in this case the full details won't be learned until the principals involved are long dead and can't be prosecuted, then the MSM will just do a "Oh BTW" and then act like we should just pretend it never happened, just like Vietnam.
The simple fact is Mexican dope dealers can just trade their dope to any of the Bumfuckistan former Warsaw Pact countries and get all the Soviet era fully auto weapons they want, including grenades and rocket launchers and even a fricking sub if they want one, they don't need American semi auto anything which is why they had to cook up "Fast & Furious" because the data they were finding showed the vast majority were carrying AK47s, just like every other guerrilla force on the planet NOT American guns.
THIS is why they should be rotting in jail, THIS is why we need a full investigation, not because somebody fucked up and people got killed but because you have the US government running a false flag op on its own people to try to manipulate them into going along with the political plans of the ones pulling the op.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.