The Legal Side of The Issue

This is the third and final issue we will be looking at and that is the Legal issue. First we have to ask yourself what is a Legal issue? A legal issue are issues that affect the gaming industry like privacy, jailbreaking, plagiarism, and contractual.

One example of a contractual legal issue is one that happened quite recently is the legal battle between Activision and Infinity Ward over the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare franchises. It started with Activision firing the two heads of Infinity Ward for holding meeting for other publishers. However in Infinity Ward’s defence Activision didn't pay the studio their $500 million royalties for the game. The whole dispute was settled privately outside of court, mostly all of the Infinity Ward staffs quit Activision to form Respawn Entertainment.

The legal battle between Infinity Ward and Activision 

Another example of this is when retired American baseball player Curt ‘Bloody Sock’ Schilling started up and founded his own gaming company 38 Studios naming it after the number on his jersey. He was given $75 million from the state of Rhode Island with the promise of 450 jobs by the end of 2012. It had 2 game projects in the pipe line one was the Kingdoms of Amalur a RPG game and the other Copernicus a MMO game. The first and only game released was Kingdoms of Amalur on February 10 2012. The game did poorly and the studio couldn't maintain the loan and had to file for bankruptcy. The problem with this was that all those people who left their old life and moved from Rhode Island to work in Massachusetts would now have to go back home with no money and disappointments among their faces.

Logo of the now defunct 38 Studios

Piracy has been a big issue in the world of gaming. When someone pirates a game it is not only illegal, but also you are taking away hard earned money from the developers and the people who put their blood sweat and tears into the game. Although technologies is improving and furthered itself as it is getting easier for people to jailbreak/modify their games console/handheld so they can get free games. One way they tackle this situation is they actually give away FIFA disc for free but would charge a couple of pennies from players if they want new strips or injury updates. This method prove to be successful as 10% of Korean household downloaded the game for free and they made more profit online than sells from stores.

Don''t pirate any games