IP Rights – Why Are They Are Important to Indie Game Developers? Part 1

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 12, 2012

This is gonna be a multi-part article about a discussion we had last week (in comments) about Intellectual Property rights. Why are they such a big deal? Why should indies care (beyond the fact that, in the opinion of most, if you are working on someone else’s IP, you ain’t indie)?

Let’s talk about a former Big Publisher. I always feel bad talking negatively speaking ill of the dead, but this particular company has been pretty much dead-and-buried for a decade, in spite of being one of the BIG PUBLISHERS of the early-to-mid 90’s, so here goes. (I should note here that any relationship I might have had with said big company gave me very little insight into their actual workings, and much of this is based on the press of the time, plus some conjectures, rumors, and ruminations by former employees).

So once upon a time, this big publisher (A Certain Company, Loathed Am I to Mention… let’s just call ’em BP – not British Petroleum!) struck a deal with a struggling but up-and-coming wrestling franchise. “Hey,” said BP, “Your audience represents a segment of potential market we don’t normally appeal to. This could be a great opportunity for us to expand, and for you to start, you know, leveraging your franchise and get more money.”

Said wrestling league, probably hard-up for cash, took the deal: an extended exclusive deal with BP.

Well, the deal went far better than either of them could have imagined. The games were Really Popular and made BP a lot of money. It went really well for the wrestling league too… in fact, in many ways, it made their business. Instead of simply giving the BP access to their audience, it vastly increased their audience as people played the game and then started tuning into wrestling matches on TV.

At least, that was BP’s take. I think they were correct in that they had a hand in it.

But years went by, and as both companies prospered, the wrestling league started getting annoyed. That multi-year exclusive deal was for peanuts, they protested… it would be worth a lot more now! BP saw it differently. They were the kingmakers – if anything, the wrestlers owed THEM for their success.

Well, the time came that the exclusive license came to an end. As you’d expect, the now-big-and-famous wrestling league jacked up their price for future licenses by an almost punitive amount. “Now,” they said to BP, “You will pay us what you should have paid us all along for our piece of awesomeness.”

“Bite me,” said BP. “We made you. We can make someone else just like you. Good luck staying awesome without us to prop you up.”

I doubt the conversation went exactly like that. But from the rumors I heard that may have suffered a little from the telephone-game effect, that was the gist of it. In the end, BP and the wrestlers went their separate ways. BP found a new, struggling wrestling league just like their former partners had once been. And the wrestlers found game publishers willing to pay through the nose to sell games with the official franchise brand that were guaranteed to make lots of sales, because they always had before.

So who won that argument?

In my opinion, nobody.

The wrestling league pretty much peaked at about that time. The “fad,” I guess, faded. Though there are innumerable reasons for their decline, I don’t think changing game publishers made that big of a difference.

And the Big Publisher? As I stated earlier, dead-and-buried.  Again, many reasons for this, most of them having little to do with wrestling games, but a lot of them having to do with it not actually owning the IP rights for most of its games. I imagine they had a tough time without being able to anchor their business on a consistently franchise, and other stories often repeated this one: the more successful they were, the more difficult life became for them later.

And the new wrestling league? Also dead-and-buried, with bits and pieces of it purchased and absorbed into the original wrestling league of this story.

There is much more to this story, but let’s just treat it as an allegory for now.

BP used to brag in magazines about its core strategy of leveraging other people’s IP. It worked out pretty well for them when video game licenses were cheap, and they didn’t have to do much more than re-texture an existing game to match the license and push it out into the stores. But as games became bigger and bigger business, the licenses got pricier, and quick-and-dirty game development got less a lot less quick (or cheap).

In an industry built on ephemeral works of creativity given form only in the collection of information, Intellectual Property rights are the lifeblood. It doesn’t matter if the product is rented, sold, or given away freely and even permits others to share a joint ownership – the holders of the IP rights have the control over their own creations and are allowed to dictate how they they will be shared with the word, insofar as legally enforceable. It is very possible for symbiotes (and their nastier, leechier cousins, the parasites) to survive or even thrive in this world, but they are always dependent upon their hosts for life.

Note the word “dependent.” As in, opposite of “independent.”

Maybe it’s unfair, but maybe it was a victim of its own success. But as much of a beneficial symbiote as BP saw itself, without enough lifeblood from hosts, it curled up and died.

IP rights matter. And yeah, they should.

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism, Mainstream Games - Comments: 3 Comments to Read



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