mobile games – Techdirt (original) (raw)

‘Deus Ex Go’ To Be Completely Disappeared With Studio Shutdown

from the deus-ex-no dept

It’s a lesson that apparently keeps needing to be re-learned over and over again: for far too many types of digital purchases, you simply don’t own the thing you bought. The arena for this perma-lesson are varied: movies, books, music. And, of course, video games. The earliest lesson in that space may have been when Sony removed a useful feature on its PlayStation 3 console after the public had already begun buying it, which is downright insane. But while that was an entire console being impacted, the lesson has been repeated in instances where games and mobile apps simply stop working when the maker decides to shut their servers down, or purchased DLC disappearing for the same reason.

And here we are again, with the announcement that Onoma, previously Square Enix Montreal, is going to be shuttering some of its mobile games. The end result is not that new purchases won’t be available. Instead, the game will just not be a thing anymore. Anywhere.

Arena Battle Champions, Deus Ex GO, Hitman Sniper: The Shadows and Space Invaders: Hidden Heroes will be shutting down on January 4th. The games will be removed from the App Store/Google Play Store on December 1st, and current players will not be able to access the games past January 4th.

Effective immediately, in-game purchases are stopped. We encourage prior in-game purchases to be used before January 4th, as they will not be refunded. On behalf of the development team, we would like to thank you for playing our games.

Deus Ex Go costs $6 on the Google Play Store. You can go buy it right damned now if you wanted to. But why would you, given that the game will simply brick and no longer function in five weeks? And, more importantly, did any of the 500k-plus people who downloaded the game over the years know that it disappearing was a possibility? I mean, I’m sure that buried in the ToS is the standard “you’re just licensing this for as long as we let you” language exists, but I’m also sure that the vast majority of the people who paid for the game didn’t realize this would be a possibility.

I’ll also note that the announcement concludes by saying: “thank you for playing our games.” Not, notably, “thank you for purchasing our games,” since apparently nobody ever really purchased them at all. What I’d give to do some person-on-the-street interviews with folks who “bought” this game only to have it disappeared.

And on the point about it disappearing, I’ll remind the class yet again that video games are art and culture, and those types of things deserve preservation efforts that none of these publishers seem to even pretend to think about.

But it’s also a tragedy from a games preservation standpoint.

People made this game, people bought this game and people enjoyed this game, for years, and with the closure of a studio and some rights changing hands it’s now just going to cease existing in an official capacity?

Perhaps piracy and illicit storing of the game will do the preservation work that the publisher should be doing. Perhaps it won’t.

But leaving a piece of culture’s preservation existing at all at the feet of those the publisher would call copyright infringers is untenable. The least the publisher could do would be to release the source-code and figure out a way for fans to host the game themselves legally.

But that won’t happen. Instead, this game may well just disappear forever.

Filed Under: arena battle champions, deus ex go, disappearing games, mobile games, ownership, video games
Companies: onoma, square enix

China Bans 'Plague Inc.' Amid Coronavirus Outbreak

from the that'll-show-'em dept

Unless you’re somehow living in a cabin without electricity somewhere (in which case, how are you even reading this, bro?), you’ve heard all about the coronavirus. The virus is the subject of roughly all the news and at least half of our brainwaves these days, with an unfortunate amount of misinformation and spin floating around far too many governments and media. Some folks, such as social media groups used by law enforcement types, seem to think this is all a joke. Others, such as our very own United States Senate, seem to think an illness infecting and killing thousands is the perfect excuse to reauthorize surveillance powers by those same law enforcement types.

China, meanwhile, isn’t fucking around. While there is some analysis to do as to whether the country did enough in the early stages of the outbreak, not to mention whether it tried to downplay risks and silence dire warnings in a gamble to keep its economy going, there is no question that eventually it went full on heavy-handed to combat the virus. Since then, quarantines of metropolitan cities have been put in place, travel restrictions abound, and shutdowns of commercial and public services are the norm.

But China’s still gonna China, meaning the government is also banning a popular mobile game about infecting humanity with sicknesses after it surged in popularity in the country.

In a statement, Ndemic Creations said: “We have some very sad news to share with our China-based players. We’ve just been informed that Plague Inc. ‘includes content that is illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China’ and has been removed from the China App Store. This situation is completely out of our control.

“It’s not clear to us if this removal is linked to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak that China is facing. However, Plague Inc.’s educational importance has been repeatedly recognised by organisations like the CDC [Centre for Disease Control and Prevention] and we are currently working with major global health organisations to determine how we can best support their efforts to contain and control Covid-19.”

Let’s be clear: this is absolutely about the coronavirus. Let’s also be clear: this is China trying desperately to control the sentiments and minds of its population. I’ve played Plague Inc. It’s great. It’s also a game about inhabiting an anthropomorphic virus/bacteria/illness and developing or evolving that illness to literally kill all of humanity on literally all of the planet. That, to put it mildly, could strike the average person as somewhat morbid in the context of a world now dealing with coronavirus.

On the other hand, the only reason China is taking this action is because Plague Inc. went wild in terms of popularity in China after the virus outbreak. China saw that as a problem and is trying to ban it to death. The reality, it seems, is that Plague Inc. actually makes it clear how hard it is for outbreaks to spread and can be therapeutic to those worried about pandemics.

It said that it was “devastated” for its Chinese players, adding that the game “encourages players to think and learn more about serious public health issues”.

Plague Inc. has become a huge hit since it was launched eight years ago. It now has 130 million players worldwide and soared in popularity in China amid the coronavirus outbreak, becoming the bestselling app in the country in January. Some players suggested they were downloading the game as a way to cope with fears surrounding the virus.

Games can be a lot of things to a lot of people. They can be therapy. They can be entertainment. They can be education.

What they can’t be, no matter the Chinese government’s actions, is dangerous in the context of coronavirus.

Filed Under: authoritarianism, censorship, china, coronavirus, games, mobile games, plauge inc.
Companies: ndemic creations

China Forbids The Use Of English Words In Mobile Games

from the not-as-crazy-as-it-looks dept

Techdirt has run many articles about China‘s direct assault on Internet freedom. Indeed, its attempts to muzzle online dissent are so all-encompassing you might think it has run out of things to censor. But you’d be wrong: China is now reining in games for mobile phones, as a post on Tech in Asia explains:

> A little over a month ago, Chinese censorship bureau SAPPRFT announced new rules that require every mobile game launched in China to be pre-approved by SAPPRFT (already-launched games will have to get retroactive approval before the grace period ends in October). Before the rules had even gone into effect, developers and analysts alike were predicting things could be bad, and that the rules might dismantle China?s indie mobile gaming scene entirely.

Making sure games aren’t seditious in any way might be expected, but there’s a rather weird twist to this latest move:

> One developer’s rant has gone viral in the Chinese web after their game was supposedly rejected by SAPPRFT for containing English words. Not offensive English words, mind you, but completely innocuous ones like “mission start” and “warning.” “I’m really fucking surprised,” wrote the developer of the rejection. > > Another developer confirmed that their game had been rejected for the same reason: including English words like “go” and “lucky.” SAPPRFT’s rules also forbid the use of traditional Chinese characters.

The use of English here is hardly subversive. The words in question form part of a global gaming language that has little to do with either the US or the UK. The ban on traditional Chinese characters, as opposed to the simplified ones that are generally used in China, is more understandable: Taiwan still uses the traditional form, so their inclusion might be seen as some kind of subliminal political statement.

The consequence is likely to be fewer games from smaller Chinese software companies, who are less able to meet the stringent new demands. As the Tech in Asia post rightly points out:

> We could be facing a future where China’s entire mobile game catalogue consists only of the games produced by powerful corporations like Tencent and Netease, with no room for startups and indies.

And that is probably the real reason for this latest move: big companies tend to be far more willing to toe the government line than smaller independents, since they have far more to lose. So, as with other apparently arbitrary moves, the latest unexpected clampdown by the Chinese government looks to be yet another example of its shrewd and subtle control of the online world.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: censorship, china, english, mobile, mobile games, words

Nintendo Plans For The Future By Pretending All Of Our Smart Phones Aren't Great Handheld Gaming Devices

from the should-work dept

While Nintendo isn’t necessarily known for forward-thinking when it comes to its business models, you don’t necessarily expect the company to be on full-on denial mode. Coupled with its rather tragic history on treating its customers well, the gaming giant seems to make a habit out of restricting its own revenue in favor of backwards thinking. That mode of business planning appears to be progressing as Nintendo has announced that, rather than making old Nintendo games available legitimately on smart phone app stores, the company is going the other direction and looking to make smart phone games available on its 3DS mobile device.

In a recent interview with the Nikkei, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata revealed that Nintendo will be remaking more smartphone games on the Nintendo 3DS. Iwata added that the company will also be remaking old Nintendo games for the handheld. The games will be low-priced, going for a few hundred yen (a couple of bucks). That’s right, instead of remaking old Nintendo games for smartphones, which anyone with a smartphone and a brain would love, Nintendo is releasing revamped and remade titles on the 3DS.

That sound you here is the collective gaming world’s eyebrows raising in unison. While the 3DS product may certainly do things most smart phones cannot, that doesn’t really come into play when it comes to Nintendo’s back-catalog of games. Imagine, just for a moment, if Nintendo chose to go the opposite direction on this. Imagine if they suddenly made their NES, SNES, and N64 games available for purchase on smart phones, devices that are perfectly suited for running those older games. Piles of money doesn’t even begin to describe what Nintendo would make from doing this.

Unfortunately, Nintendo is steeped in such a pervasive culture of wanton control that this strategy may not even have occurred to them. But they certainly must be aware that these games are already being played on smart phones, which really just drives home the notion that not making them legitimately available is simply pissing money away.

I get that Nintendo makes games for Nintendo hardware. I get it! I also get that some of these smartphone tie-ups could be big money-makers. But there are old games that people are already playing with emulators on smartphones anyway. So why not give these games a proper (and official) release?

Because, Nintendo. That’s why.

Well okay then.

Filed Under: 3ds, games, handheld, mobile games, smartphones
Companies: nintendo

Deer Hunter Vs. Killshot: Why Specific Expression Matters More Than Similar Shooter-Genre Staples

from the not-like-the-other dept

I imagine it must be very, very annoying to be the creator of a video game and to feel as though some other company came along, cloned your work, and is now making money off of that clone. It’s this annoyance factor that likely leads to so many legal proceedings over game “clones”, even if so many of them fail because the it’s the expression that matters in copyright suits, not a general or generic idea. Unique expressions are what matter. Even in totally misguided legal attempts, those involved usually have the good sense to go after games that directly copy graphics and such, not the general ideas behind the games.

Which is simply not the case when it comes to Glu Mobile’s lawsuit against Hothead Games over the latter’s production of Kill Shot and its supposed straight cloning of Deer Hunter.

Glu Mobile is suing mobile game studio Hothead Games for copying it popular Deer Hunter 2014 mobile game. Hothead’s Kill Shot isn’t about hunting deer at all. Rather, you’re a sniper that hunts enemy soldiers. Nevertheless, Glu alleges in a federal lawsuit filed in San Francisco today that Hothead’s title violated copyright and trade infringement laws.

“Kill Shot is effectively a complete ripoff of our game Deer Hunter 2014,” said Chris Akhavan, the president of publishing at San Francisco-based Glu Mobile, in an interview with GamesBeat. “The only difference is that in Kill Shot, you are shooting humans. In our game, you are shooting deer and other animals.”

It’s not the only difference, though. Let’s get this started by saying that the games do indeed have similarities. They are both shooters undertaken from the first person perspective with realistic guns and aiming sights that are used to shoot living things. But those living things are different, the settings are different, the concepts and themes are different, and even the models of the guns, while both realistic, are different. This is straight copying only insofar as the copying is of common and generic shooter-game concepts. Even the image Glu Mobile hand-picked to include in their filing demonstrates this.

Yes, similar, but not the same, and even the similarities are of the basic shooter-game style variety. Yes, you can scope in on targets, but the scopes are different and scopes don’t equal copyright. Yes, there’s bullet time animations, but that doesn’t equal copyright either, or else everyone owes the Max Payne franchise a pretty penny. While similar, these games aren’t really any more similar than, say, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. Or any other first person shooter from the 90’s, for that matter. And this is from the image in their filing. Videos of the games in action show the differences more starkly.

Again, similar, but they’re both shooters, so what did you expect? Generic genre similarities don’t rise to copyright or trademark claims. The trade dress claim in particular seems misguided, since the themes involved are quite different and none of the names of the games or companies even come close to being similar. This should end up as yet another lesson that similar generic concepts, such as sniping and zooming, don’t translate to cloning as far as copyright is concerned. And, while the filing accuses a lot of copying, the reader is left with the feeling that there isn’t a whole lot of weight there.

Glu alleges that Hothead Games, based in Vancouver, Canada, copied things like Deer Hunter 2014’s marketing, tutorial, user interface, controls, virtual economy, pricing of items, and even some of its flaws. Akhavan noted, for instance, that a miscategorized assault rifle in Deer Hunter 2014 was also miscategorized in Kill Shot. Glu’s tutorial has 21 steps, of which Glu says Hothead copied 18. Many player reviewers mistake Glu Mobile as the publisher of Kill Shot because of the similarities, Akhavan said.

Again, similar, but not the same. It seems clear that Kill Shot was inspired by the type of game genre of which Deer Hunter is a part, but basic interface and control schemes are not creative expression of a protected kind, and pointing to similar mistakes within the games when it comes to whether a weapon qualifies as an assault rifle is a stretch (trust me, it’s an easy mistake to make and get yelled at by gun activists for). I can see why Glu Mobile might be annoyed, but I think their time would be better spent building on the massive success of their gaming franchise than in court suing a competitor.

Filed Under: clones, copying, copyright, deer hunter, expression, first person shooter, idea, kill shot, mobile games, video games
Companies: glu mobile, hothead games