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Metsys

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Joined: Sep 2014

Posts: 29

Metsys is doing well so far

Dec 4, 2014, 06:25 AM
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Granted Interplay is not Epic, but Sol Contingency did get shut down even though they had no plans on selling it, and it was Interplay's legal right to do so.

Once you make a derivative work, which all fanart and fangames are, you are at the mercy of the rights holders. Pretty much all companies turn a blind eye to fanart. It's how fans express their love for something. But once the scope gets bigger and the project has enough eyeballs, like a full-length movie or video game, they have to make the decision between letting it slide or shutting it down, and the latter happens quite a lot.

I figure most of the legal reasoning behind this has a lot to do with trademark law. Both names and character designs can be trademarked, but if you as a rights holder don't actively go after people infringing on your trademarks, you can loose your trademark. It's happened before and is how trademark law works. The rest I think has to do with creating dilution within a brand (people getting confused as to what is a fangame or not and the variations in quality, etc). Some companies care a lot less about this than others.

There was a King's Quest fan game that was shut down by the rights holders but later green lit after the rights holders instructed them to simply remove King's Quest from the title of the game. I imagine everything else within the game was pretty fantasy generic (like the original King's Quest games were) so trademarked character designs would not have been present, so brand confusion wouldn't have been a problem either.