Category: Commentary

This is really disturbing.

Eurogamer.net: How Games Fund Arms Manufacturers

The Eurogamer article is about the link between the games industry and the armaments and munitions industries.

Toyota and Nissan work with racing game developers to show off their vehicles as pristinely desirable. Nike and Adidas position their logo on virtual boots. Gibson licenses plastic versions of its guitars in the hope players will progress from the coloured buttons of the peripheral to the nickel-wound strings of a Les Paul.

And Barrett, creator of the M82, a shoulder-fired, .50-caliber semi-automatic sniper rifle, hopes that the appearance of its weapon in a video game will, in time, turn young players into gun owners.

Aha, so the guns make their way into games as advertising. That’s cool. Sounds like an additional way for a game developer to make money. It’s product placement after all.

But…

“Most of the guns in the game were modelled on real weapons,” he says today. “The Walther PPK, Kalashnikov AK47, FN P90 and so on.”

But at a late stage in development Ken Lobb, the game’s producer, called Hollis to say they could not use the genuine brand names.

The use of fabricated gun names was acceptable in the fictional universe of James Bond, where a licence to kill did not rely upon licensing. But for those games based around real armed forces, the inclusion of brand names was necessary to remain faithful to the source material.

However, the gun makers are more forthcoming. “[It’s] absolutely the same as with cars in games,” says Barrett’s Vaughn. “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. But we could negotiate on that.”

So, they use the games as advertising and also expect a royalty fee? That’s really shitty.

Barrett insists the game developer purchases one of the company’s guns to aid the 3D modellers in their work. “[The gun must] perform to the standards that our rifles do in the real world,”

That’s a minimum of a $10,000 fee on top of the licensing fee.

Read the article for even more disturbing details. It’s plain to me that the guns and games relationship needs cleansed.

Gabe Newell from Valve:

Newell believes that if Apple makes a move on the living room before the PC industry gets a foothold, then the Cupertino manufacturer can “shut out the open-source creativity” possible with the Steam platform.

Valve’s DRM system makes Apple look like a saint. I love Valve games but Steam is a closed, DRM-heavy, anti-consumer stick. And on Mac it’s sluggish and buggy as hell too.

Waffle about open source creativity if you want, Gabe, but when your system means my account can only be used to play one of the 50 games I have bought from you at a time (meaning I can’t log in elsewhere and let my son play one of my other legally purchased games, then you look like the king of Digital Restrictions Management.