Tank Commander - PA minigame v1.5 (closed)

This will explain why this reaction was so ... strange for me. But forgot about it.

Let's make this as full game, not just minigame. Maybe I don't have much time right now, but I'm preparing design doc for this game and I need to draw some conceptarts. There will be a lot of new things, many tanks, upgrades, tank components, maps and missions I will stay with name "Tank Commander" and I think that is possible that i will show first info about it in 2 weeks. I will release it for Android, Ios and I will try my luck on Steam.
I want to talk about this with my Boss to get support in creating this. (You can check games "Draw Slasher" and "Run Like Hell" created by Mass Creation where I work)

This is not game about PA, but think about this. First game created becouse of PA

I will finish my website and start dev blog there about this project. This can be interesting.

I will start soon new topic in "Unrelated Discussion" category

A new game with new assets sounds fun.

I would go out on a leg and say it is more of a 'don't ask - don't tell'-issue. As long as you don't request clarification on the legal status of the matter they don't have to comment on it, either. As soon as you ask whether they endorse what you do with their assets or not, they are obliged to take a stand. And refusing the rights to your assets is the cleanest way to provide future ambiguities and all sort of legal jazz.
Apart from that: If they allowed free usage of assets how could they then possibly enforce commander model/skin-restrictions as they do with their backer tiers? They could simply be freely modded back in.

It's just an all around sticky situation and I think Uber just wants to keep everything simple.

Uber is definitely very supportive of the Community. They give us free usage of all of their assets for videos and the like. They chat with us. They're awesome.

This... this was just really sticky.

And honestly, it's probably better for this mini game to use its own assets. Now the creator can expand it further and monetize it. After all, he should be rewarded for his excellent work.

It was a really well made game after all.

Very true but thoroughly disconnected from my post if I might say so. Best wishes, I guess.

What did you expect? It has never been ok to copy content from other peoples games and then make some own public project with it. And this is not an exception. Your project just got too serious and big so uber had no choice but to close it.

Most stuff in this law area is seriously far beyond common sense ...
Letting somebody make a fun game that's free and does not hurt anyone should be easily possible if the law would be reasonable worked out. I am always just trying to think about "what if anyone acted like this" and in the case of fanmade games it would probably be rather good for Uber and PA if we had millions of people going crazy about random fangames for it. Would be nice for PA publicity for sure.
Dunno the details of US laws in this area, but it's reasonable to think they are just as fucked up about this as anywhere else.

No that's no true.

I...god, i don't know if english has a word for this. Basically, Uber can ignore copyright infringement (which this is) for as long as they want, effectively allowing it. However, as soon as the creator specifically asks for permission, if Uber says "you can" without any licence, it opens up the legal floodgates.

Minecraft mods are all in violation of the terms of use, for example, but because Mojang does not fight any of it (why would they), it's allowed without legal consequence.

Prior to this request, Uber was legally allowed to keep an eye shut on this, but with the request their hand was forced.

The problem is: where is the boundary. You'd need even more legislation to prevent more unwanted infringement

"Make it free and have no revenue of it" is a pretty simple restriction to me.
Yes there may be weird edge cases, but I think a common misconception of the copyright industry as a whole is to think that those few edge cases are actually threatening anyone.
The gain of having people go crazy about your IP by doing fan based modifications, own games and stuff is potentially huge. So as long as that does not conflict with your own business model it is just a bad idea to stop people from doing stuff like this.

In most cases accepting a few infringements is just so much better than shutting down everything that people do with it.
I am talking not about Uber now, but I really think the stuff that can come out of the cooperative work of a huge fanbase that freely can use assets of a game/movie/book/whatever are _huge_ and in some cases probably are the core of the success of the original work.

I work with and draw up contracts on a daily basis. The law is anything but common sense.

The US is a Common Law jurisdiction. That means that legal cases are decided on the basis of Statute, Precedent and occasionally Equity.

Without knowing the specifics of US copyright law as I do English shipping law, I'd imagine that this particular situation is one where Equity might become an issue. If Uber specifically grants explicit permission to Ozone to use in-game assets for his game, it sets an apparent precedent to others that they can use the assets in their software too, on the same terms as Ozone.

Whether or not Uber specifically grants permission to any of these is more or less immaterial.

One further point: how does one define revenue earned through use of the game's assets? If someone embeds Ozone's game into another webpage and puts ads on that page, or indeed redirects to his page via an Adfly link, is the revenue being earned through use of the game's assets?

This is why I hate lawyers.

To you, yes. to most people, yes. part of my current job is reading through legal documents for calculations. I could fill 10 pages with the formulae and how to use it. The other 240 pages are legal stuff making absolutely sure nothing can be wrongly interpreted and taking away any doubt.

Legal stuff is immensely difficult because even the slightest wrong wording can open up loopholes. Which is why the current broken-but-working system is used.

I dunno, I suspect there are good reasons why this law is how it is. People could make a mini game as an excuse to share games content (music, etc.) to people for free. Or people could make free version of PA that is almost exactly like the full game and people could just play it without ever buying the real PA. It's hard to define where the line goes. And it would be difficult to keep an eye on all the fanmade stuff just in case there is something "illegal" in them.

If that mini game becomes really succesfull, I am sure that ozo could make some kind of deal with uber to add downloadable PA skins into the game. Just like Team Fortress 2 has alot of promo items, just like Super Meat Boy has alot of playable characters from other games, etc.

And I think it's more respectful to not use other peoples content without their permission.

Here's the deal:
Although we think the Tank Commander game is cool, when you are dealing with intellectual property you can get into a situation where you inadvertently give away your rights to it by sharing it even once. We'd have to have, and pay for, a thorough legal review in order to give the ok, and that would probably end with a lawyer telling us it is a bad idea anyway. We could go the direction of licensing, but then in come the lawyers again and it is really just a big distraction from shipping PA. So I asked ozonexo3 not to use our art assets for his game.

The good news is that he can continue the game if he wants either by creating his own assets, since he told us he is a 3d artist himself, or by buying the surprisingly cheap assets you can find in the Unity store.

That's pretty much universal law there. Whenever you think "omg this sux why is it this way", there's usually a very good reason why. mostly, "law of lesser evil" stuff

Hi, thank you for the clarification on the issue. I gather that mods being used inside of PA won't present the same issues as they're part of Ubers ecosystem?

for me there is only one thing why this should be closed.
Tank Commander was made to support Uber and Planetary Annihilation, that was my idea.
But it ended making problems for Uber, magic barrier of free use was almost crossed.

For me I can even give all rights to my Code from minigame to Uber. In that sittuation game can be finished as it is.
But big game studio will never did something like that. This is just stupid, they have many talented people there and if they want to make PA minigame, then they will make it.

So, again, there is no good way to continue it. The sad thing is that I wanted to make this last update, v1.6, that will close project, its almost done. But when uber asked me again, why I'm still working on it, I realize that this project comes too far already.

Looks like many people here liked the gameplay, it would not be wise to forget it. Even Uber said that I should "reskin" it and continue working. So this is what I will do, and I will try my best to make it much better than this minigame can ever be. This will require time, I need to prepare some docs, concepts, talk to some people, but this game will be made.

That just in case is where it just goes wrong. Let them be. People are way too crazy about these "but some edge case will..." . As long as there is more "okay" fanmade stuff it's fine. Just accept the bad ones as collateral damage of an overall "good thing". Pirates will do their thing anyway.

It should be possible to let this question at the hands of the IP Owner once it happens.
So if the IP Owner decieds that something goes too far they should just kill it then and have the right to do so, even if they gave a general "okay for non commercial use" before. There should be no need to disallow everything far ahead.

That's a horrible law there it seems. It should be possible for an IP owner to simply give a little "okay, but we reserve all rights to kill anything that goes bad(=trying to hurt our business/make money of our work)" at any time without giving away any actual rights at their work.

Uber fear your game and your thoughts!
You in 24 H make minigame that grab all players atencion....Uber is make PA how long?
That means lot things about PA that i prefer not tell.............
I really dont like when doors are closed to smart people just because they fear something!
Sry but iff we dont alowed fresh minds with good ideas,maybe thats wy many companies games are close doors......

Your minigame its a awsome publicity to Planetary anhilation any one see that......


Uber told you to close the project thats really sad......

I'd love to help you work on the reskinned version and KNight would probably be happy to work with you on the models. This is great work and I'd love to see you continue it!

This is the dumbest post i read all week.
Uber built PA from the ground up, everything created by them...The guy with the mini game did not.