Posts Tagged ‘Legal’

Dutch Game Garden launches at the NLGD Festival June 19th in Utrecht

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

The Dutch Game Garden has announced that they’ll be launching at the NLGD Festival of Game on June 19th in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Coming hot off a nice pat on the back, the Dutch gaming industry is poised to be a major force to contend with in the Euro gaming market.  The Dutch Game Garden foundation is financed in part by the Dutch government, and is supported by a number of universities and schools.  These schools along with the government are extremely interested in promoting the growth of the gaming sector.  In 2007, the Dutch gaming industry revenue exceeded that of the Dutch film industry, and figures report the gaming sector to have a growth rate of 50% faster than any other Dutch economic sector.

The Dutch Game Garden will support, encourage, and do all it can to help fledgling developers and startups located in the Netherlands, along with companies that choose to relocate to the Netherlands.  They tackle this via a three pronged attack:

The Game Development Club which seeks to encourage students of game design, media, arts and programming courses at universities and school to work together in collaborative projects.

The Game Incubator is a pot o’ soup for talented young entrepreneurs.  The Incubator project helps young entrepreneurs navigate the often hectic ropes of not only setting up a company, but keeping it afloat, and ultimately, bringing their product to market.  By providing training in entrepreneurship and coaching, assisting with housing, providing tools and a network of technical, financial and legal experts, the Incubator seeks to help Mr./Ms. ‘Hey I got an awesome game, but where the heck do I start?’ to hit the ground running.

The Game Development Business Centers provide top-notch facilities for existing and growing game firms in the Utrecht region.  The ultimate goal of these facilities is to create a hotspot of gaming, with access to other important companies, A1 research institutes, universities and schools.

The Dutch Game Garden will offer an official presentation along with a panel discussion at the NLDG festival.

To learn more about the Dutch Game Garden: http://www.dutchgamegarden.nl

To learn more about the NLDG: http://www.nlgd.nl

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Parlez vous l’essay?

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Canadian residents are not required to pay an entry fee for Blizzard’s upcoming arena tournament. Instead, Canadian residents are required to write a 250 word typewritten essay comparing the video gaming culture in the Great White North to the video gaming culture in the States. Click here for the tournament main page and then click on rules (Blizz isn’t allowing direct linking to this page).

Canadian residents are not required to pay an Entry Fee in order to enter. Instead, Canadian residents may enter by submitting a 250 word typewritten essay comparing the video gaming culture in Canada to the video gaming culture in the United States on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper and mailing their essay to Essay Entry for The North American Blizzard Entertainment Arena Tournament, P.O Box 18979, Irvine, CA 92623. Essay entries must be received no later than March 31, 2008 in order to be eligible. Essay entrants represent and warrant that the essay is their original work and does not infringe the rights of any third party. By entering, essay entrants hereby grant, without further consideration, all right, title and interest in and to their essay to Sponsor.

Ok, so the deadline has passed, so if you’re living somewhere in a province under a red maple leaf, sorry, but you missed the boat. On the other side of the coin here, gotta hand it to Blizz, excellent crowd sourcing and market research all within a highly specialized field. I’d LOVE to be sitting on the marketing review and research and development panels on the receiving end of these essays. Nice work Blizz!

On a side note, all Canadian contests involving a game of skill or chance must have a no fee entry clause. Normally this is covered by the STQ. The STQ is a skill testing question, used in order to qualify a ‘potential’ winner. While this question is usually mathematically in nature, sometimes a trivia question has also been used. I’m assuming that a 250 word essay will be a perfectly acceptable STQ.

A skill testing question is a legal aspect attached to all contests that Canadian residents can enter. Some contests may require you to answer the STQ when you enter the contest, other may require it only after you are declared a ‘potential’ winner. Because Canadian law prohibits “for-profit” gaming or betting, but does allow prizes to be given for skill (or mixed games of skill and chance), chance-based games (which, a random draw for contesting is), stays legal when contestants are required to answer the “skill” testing question. The STQ is a mathematical question, which you must answer correctly to be declared the contest winner. Contests which are run by sponsors in the USA are required to include a STQ if the contest winner is a Canadian resident, even though STQs are not required by contest winners in the USA. Some Canadian contests will ask a trivia question in place of a mathematical STQ.

 

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Blizzard takes the battle of the bot offline and brings it to creator’s front door

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

It seems as though Michael Donnelly’s WoW bot (Glider) has ruffled some serious feathers in the City of Love. Basically, it shakes out like this; Donnelly’s bot ‘grinds, loots, heals, and even farms soul shards without you’ for a small license fee of $25. In other words, this bot will make you boatloads of money, mats, rep, etc. and pretty much anything else you want, all while you’re off at school, the gym, or sleeping.

It’s a well known fact that MMO producing companies have a high disdain for anyone caught cheating the game. Be this gold farming, buying accounts, or using bots to perform automated functions. On the other hand, there will always be those out there that are willing to push the edges of the envelope, and see just how far they can go with Blizzard or any other manufacturer.

Where the legalese comes in is that Blizzard is claiming that Blizzard’s designs expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time. Hmm: clearly they’re unaware of how much time I spend playing the game. ;)
Blizzard is also claiming that Glider infringes on copyrights and is a violation of the EULA “because it copies the game into RAM in order to avoid detection by anti-cheat software”.

Donnelly contends that there is no copyright violation present as “no ‘copy’ of the Warcraft game client software is ever made.”

As it stands right now, Donnelly and Blizzard (along with parent company Vivendi Games) are lawyering up, and it looks to be an interesting showdown in the Ring of Blood. Now this is some serious PvP action! And please dear god: let the judge use the phrase PWND, just once: please? :)

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