Developers Should Own the Intellectual Property Rights

Usually, when AAA games are being made, the copyright — or Intellectual Property — is the property of the title’s publishing studio and not its development studio. That has been controversial in the industry for a while now, and there have been some efforts to help with this situation, which I’ll look at later, but first, why is that bad, and why should the average gamer care?

Well, to answer that, let’s look at the job of the publisher compared to that of the developer. A publisher is in charge of marketing a title, providing a budget (most of the time), and usually has the final say in the direction that should be taken when working on a game. The developers, though, are in charge of actually making the videogame — the coding, drawing, and anything else is done by the development studio. Usually, it also has most of the control over the story and only depends on the publisher for confirmation. The terms of these are, usually, that the publisher gets most of the money from sales, which makes sense: it took the financial risk of marketing and providing a budget for the game. However, the problem is that, unlike the developers, the publisher’s end goal is the money itself and not creating a good experience.

For example, let’s look at the new Life is Strange entry, Life is Strange: Double Exposure. The original creators of Life is Strange, DON’T NOD, have worked on the game with Square Enix as its publisher, and since going (mostly) independent, DON’T NOD does not have the rights to Life is Strange anymore. In Double Exposure, our main character from the first game, Max Caulfield, returns, with an entirely different story to the one the original writers envisioned for her. According to DON’T NOD, if Max chooses to sacrifice Arcadia Bay, Max and Chloe are together forever from then on — either as best friends or romantic partners, whichever one the player prefers. In Deck Nine’s new game, though, Max and Chloe broke up because, for some reason, Chloe started to be worried about Max manipulating her (which is nonsensical, but not the point). Bringing Max back was a sure way to get a lot of sales — something a publisher would prioritise — but something that DON’T NOD has said it will never do. If DON’T NOD had the rights to the title, never would the story and characters have been butchered so badly.

Though, as I said, it’s not all doom and gloom — there are things going on to combat this situation and give the copyright to the actual creators of the content, the people who actually create the things you love. The best example of this is Ludwig and Pirate Software’s publishing company, Offbrand Games — a videogame publishing company with the purpose of minimising publisher overreach and just letting people create videogames without having to worry about the publisher changing everything to be more marketable. As of now, Offbrand Games has published only one game — the sequel to the fan-favourite fighting game Rivals of Aether. It’ll be a while before we see massive changes in the industry, but having some developer-friendly options available is great and paves the way forward to get to the point where it’s standard for developers to own the rights and not publishers.

And whilst it’s not tackling the same issue, the Stop Killing Games initiative, of which I’ve been a supporter since it first began, can help a lot with this. A law requiring the copyright owners to make a game playable after end-of-life sounds like something most publishers would not want to deal with, so any publisher would be much more inclined to just pass that problem onto the development studio, and the only way to do that is by letting it retain the copyright.

Overall then, I think I made it pretty clear why the development studio should be the one to own the rights to videogame titles and not publishers. I’m sure it’s an attainable goal, but it’ll be a long time before we reach it, so for now, I would advise showing support of fairer publishing: European citizens should go sign the Stop Killing Games initiative, and anyone who likes fighting games should purchase Rivals of Aether II — it’s an amazing game that honestly everyone should play, sure, but purchasing a title published by Offbrand Games will show how much that players want publishers to do their jobs of marketing the game, and leave working on it to the creative minds in the development studio.