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Welcome Cohort 11
Welcome to all who will be joining the Video Game Law @ Allard community today. Thrilled and privileged to be your guide. In terms of substantive legal issues arising in real time over the semester, the real word of gamers, developers, industry and governments usually ensure a roller-coaster ride of things to talk about over […]
Remember that people buy GPUs for mining Bitcoins?
If you don’t, let me remind you something that was said during my presentation: Prices of Graphic Processing Units (the devices which allow gamers to process video games on their PCs and consoles) jumped sharply last year due to their great processing power for mining bitcoins (=the process by which transactions are verified and added […]
Making a Purpose-Built Esports Game
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/PascalLuban/20171117/309833/Will_current_games_turn_eSport_into_a_massmarket_affair.php This article caught my eye because of the discussions we’ve had in recent weeks about developers making concerted efforts to break into the esports scene with their games. It has some interesting points on what a game developer should aim for if it is making a game with the primary purpose of creating a […]
Esports Presentation Follow-up: News Stories of Interest
During my presentation, I spoke about some incidents and events that happened in the recent years. Although details of these incidents were not necessary for the overall message of my presentation, I thought some of you may still be interested nonetheless. Therefore, I have included some links to further reading on some of the more […]
Reminiscent of Anoop Desai’s Presentation
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/11/for-console-games-downloads-are-approaching-a-tipping-point/ This piece on the News of the Week got me thinking about the presentation that Anoop Desai from EA gave back at the beginning of the term. While we aren’t quite yet at the point where games are offered as a streaming service via a cloud system (similar to what Netflix did for television), […]
EA Battlefront 2 Comment Most Downvoted in the History of Reddit
Good afternoon everyone, I hope you have been enjoying your holiday weekend. On Friday we talked about about gamers-as-consumers backlash, specifically mentioning the original iteration of Steam, and we noted that social media has intensified this process. I wanted to give you a heads up on what is happening today: EA has just received the […]
Blockchain Presentation Follow Up – $300m lost ‘accidentally’
In case anyone wants to further read about the incident, here’s the link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/cryptocurrency-300m-dollars-stolen-bug-ether A really expensive accident I must admit.. Idan
Esports Presentation Follow-up
In my presentation this past Friday I thought it would be fun to include some video clips showing what the atmosphere is like inside the stadiums where these big esports tournaments are held. I decided not to include them because of the technical difficulties we had with videos in the past few weeks, but for […]
Violence & Criminal Acts – Liability and Defences
[x-post from Forum post last Friday which I put in the wrong place] Good afternoon all, This is the particular mission in the COD series which I referenced during our class today. https://youtu.be/gXBDkevx5lM?t=84 I can definitely see this influencing someone to commit such acts, but in terms of liability for any damage caused, I still […]
Owning Genres
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-10-16-does-anyone-own-the-battle-royale-genre I find the idea that a developer could own the rights to a video game genre to be ridiculous. It goes back to Boyden. There are so many ways in which a battle royale video game could be “expressed” that to allow the developers of PUBG to retain exclusive rights to all battle royale […]