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[EnigmaticHat]

Yup.  Certain parties have been known to frivolously sue just to make an example of people.

[Scoops Novel]

What wrong with: I am making a generic space soldier game that really has nothing to do with 40K (wink wink, nudge nudge). Then "someone else" makes a 40K mod for it. Make the base game into an extremely obvious 40K parody, and a trivial "third party" mod that removes the "parody" part.

Its a matter of intent. You're making a game that replicate the feel, tone, of warhammer 40k, with the intent of someone else placing in all the lore and art from GW ip. Its one thing to just make a game, that can be modded. Its another thing, to make a game, that is suppose to be modded. With that model, GW could probably make a case, and if they couldnt, they can just drag you to court for lolz. For GW, they dont often care about rumination from the suit.

Ok then. As i understand it, there's jack shit they can do if you make it a parody. Close enough for the fanboys and leaves them without a leg to stand on. If you're guaranteed to win such a court case i can see people putting up with GW's bullshit to get it made.

[LoSboccacc]

Wrong. They can still drag you to court. And for you to win, there's an expensive legal battle to win. Who's footing the bill? Being awarded expenses is not a guarantee.

[Scoops Novel]

Wrong. They can still drag you to court. And for you to win, there's an expensive legal battle to win. Who's footing the bill? Being awarded expenses is not a guarantee.

Isn't it still very likely, especially with frivolous litigations? Forget about mods for now, paid parody's are iron clad as far as i know.

[LoSboccacc]

maybe you can survive the test of irony in court, which is not as much ironclad (especially if you're profiting from it, even indirectly trough ads on your distribution website) and even if you win in court the expenses are the one bringing you down, let alone if you don't win, but less assume you do win: how are you gonna recoup the proceeding costs?

gw, as bethesda, have an history of litigating their IP proactively for the fear of losing profits. winning matter not to them, they can outstarve most of little indie devs. court proceedings with asymmetrical parties most often than not result in a loss when money runs out, being wrong or right irrelevant

[NivlacSupreme]

wow I brought these forums back to life.

[Flow]

Ooft, I don't check in a couple of days and we get a bunch of new posts!

Basically, most of what has been said so far was my logical path. Even if I don't want to earn any money doing all of this, I still face the risk of being sued into oblivion by lawsuit-happy GW who have a track record of destroying small organisation.

I explored the option of acquiring a GW license. The requirements basically exclude myself currently - you need to be a studio with previous, published titles. Their standards may have slacked in recent years, but you still need to apply and be approved by their IP department. "Oh hey I want to make this retro-style game aimed for the hardcore stats-loving Chapter Master folks and no I don't have a team, or an experienced studio" is not going to get me very far. I am currently working on at least one title for another company that will reach Steam, but that isn't my studio, and it's likely not enough to get a license anyway.

The difficulty faced is that to garner the support of people interested in Chapter Master you need to make a game that looks, feels, smells and tastes like Chapter Master. How do you implement a generic, important gene-seed and founding chapter system? You just can't, without really stretching the genericness of your engine. I opted for DNA purity/mutation, but that also is really obviously geneseed and if it isn't it's just a racial purity game and has all of those problems.

If you do go full Chapter Master, you're just doomed from the get-go if you ever want to not get C&D'd, Or if you ever want to make any money from the project (and realtalk: you probably do with the huge time investment), you're almost guaranteeing a lawsuit.

So where does that leave you? You either abandon all precepts of Chapter Master at which point why are you even bothering or why would you not go pick up some other community that doesn't have IP issues (as Duke seems to have done with Tower Girls)? Or you make a genuinely different space game, in which case you're like any other indie game studio and have no following to begin with. It's really hard to find a valid way to make anything remotely Chapter Master if you care at all about your future.

And for the record, C&D demands can totally go beyond just "stop doing this" - they can demand repayment for lost income, basically anything, it's not a legal document so much as a list of demands and a rough legal basis to sue otherwise. So if they fire off a C&D and demand lost revenue, how does one deal with that? You either refuse and go to court and pay a ton of money, or you pay a ton of money, there are numerous cases online of fan projects being C&D'd into a corner by companeios that are making a point, and GW ahs a history of making points.

So, yeah, I'm still trying really hard to find a way to do this - I still am keeping in touch with the other people that worked briefly on SSME with me and am trying to come up with a good way to carry on the project as I super enjoyed the programming and engine building. It's just really hard to find a way to do it, nevermind find a way to do it that doesn't breach copyright and can generate some income so I can pay the artists, justify my own time vs freelancing to some extent, etc.

I welcome any ideas as to how to do it legally, safely and in an interesting way, but I'm drawing a blank right now.

TL;DR: Finding a good way to do this without being sued is really hard. You avoid legal battles by sacrificing specificity and stacking your product up alongside every other generic indie game except you're not an indie game studio and can't pay for art and sound and UI designers and so on, so you just lose.

[MrWiggles]

Spoiler: Quote Chain (click to show/hide)

What wrong with: I am making a generic space soldier game that really has nothing to do with 40K (wink wink, nudge nudge). Then "someone else" makes a 40K mod for it. Make the base game into an extremely obvious 40K parody, and a trivial "third party" mod that removes the "parody" part.

Its a matter of intent. You're making a game that replicate the feel, tone, of warhammer 40k, with the intent of someone else placing in all the lore and art from GW ip. Its one thing to just make a game, that can be modded. Its another thing, to make a game, that is suppose to be modded. With that model, GW could probably make a case, and if they couldnt, they can just drag you to court for lolz. For GW, they dont often care about rumination from the suit.

Ok then. As i understand it, there's jack shit they can do if you make it a parody. Close enough for the fanboys and leaves them without a leg to stand on. If you're guaranteed to win such a court case i can see people putting up with GW's bullshit to get it made.

You dont seem to have a strong understand of parody. A Parody, is a satire. Generally short form. (As in shorter the better.) This game, and any game like it wouldnt be a parody at all. You could make it a parody, but dont think folks want to play satirical grim dark 40k.

[Scoops Novel]

40k started off a parody,

Spoiler: most of it's internet culture is parody (click to show/hide)

, i think it's pretty safe people would play it. Have you considered a parody Flow?

maybe you can survive the test of irony in court, which is not as much ironclad (especially if you're profiting from it, even indirectly trough ads on your distribution website) and even if you win in court the expenses are the one bringing you down, let alone if you don't win, but less assume you do win: how are you gonna recoup the proceeding costs?

I thought it's common for frivolous litigators to pay the defendants expenses. Can you tell me a bit more about people failing the test of irony? I'll be the first to admit i'm talking out of my ass here.

People talk about patent trolls, surely suing a for profit parody falls into the same boat? Aren't courts currently trying to change what enables this bullshit?

[nenjin]

I think we're all more or less talking out our asses here. That said....

I think one test of the parody and/or irony is whether someone can reasonably assume the product came from the actual owner of the IP because it fails to make it clear that it's not. (Despite "Warhammer 40,000 is a trademarked product of Games Workshop blah blah blah" disclaimers.) The reasoning is that if they could, they could be paying money to someone not GWS who doesn't really understand the difference.

And the thing is, wanting to get paid for your work is what really starts to complicate things. We're living in the era of Paetron and Kickstarter. Things that do really well with fans are things fans want to pay for so they see more of it. They want to reward developers monetarily both just out of the goodness of their hearts and in the hope (especially with indie games with long life spans) of continued awesomeness.

It essentially forces companies like GWS to defend their IP even though the desire isn't to attack it directly. If you let people get away with it, you've basically failed to defend your IP. It's why, as much as the whole cloying, creativity-exterminatus'ing atmosphere around GWS properties sucks, I can't really fault them for what they're doing. Sure, it's been malicious before and whose to say it'd not be malicious now. But if they do nothing, it becomes open season on the IP. And no business that makes money sits around and let's that happen. The system is designed in their favor to not let it happen. And the system (abused as it is now) does have a reason for existing. Because 40,000 dank, shitty knock offs of the 40k IP being charged for would diminish its identity and selling power.

I'll be honest, I knew things were going to get complicated when Paetron got mentioned in the same sentence as CM. CM at the end of Duke's tenure with it was a solid enough game that it, IMO, became a legitimate threat with a target painted on it. Things actually being good tends to have that effect. The only thing that was keeping CM even marginally safe was that it was being done purely out of fandom. We could laugh and joke about GWS sitting in their Daemonic Fortresses, bathing in pools of money and virgin blood, waiting to put their thumb on the game when it was just starting out. But it kinda became a little less funny to joke about when the game started treading the line.

It's always sad to me that GWS doesn't really understand how to utilize its fanbase sometimes. Or care, I guess. Or value it.

I remember the Black Library Forums as a place where people could write and post fanfic. The publishing wing of GWS would run contests, and on the rare occasion even maybe publish someone. People would talk about 40k novel lore and lore in general, give each other writing tips. It was fuckin' rad.

And then they shut down the forums and BlackLibrary.com became a place where you could *just* order novels and e-books.

A lot of 40k fans, for better or worse, are pretty fanatically devoted to the lore and the world, and if GWS actually cared about their fanbase they could get a lot of them, like picking up games like CM and giving it a real chance with real money behind it. (Or shit any money.) But no. I've been around GWS for 20+ goddamn years, and they're just as jerky and greedy now as they were when I was a kid.

[EnigmaticHat]

Ah well, soon enough 3D printing will do them in and then everything will be fanmade   no idea if that's actually true or not

[nenjin]

Ah well, soon enough 3D printing will do them in and then everything will be fanmade   no idea if that's actually true or not

It's happened to some extent and probably just contributes to GWS further buckling down. They just assume a tangible loss to their fig sales and try to make it up somewhere else. (Like making starter kits ever more expensive by including more shit in them, and printing another edition of a Codex.)

[debvon]

Or like selling licenses to garbage game developers. Eisenhorn: Xenos is utterly terrible. Only the second game from "Pixel hero games", their first game was pretty awful as well. Their catch phrase is "We make great games!" and yet they've only made two games. One unimpressive ipad game that costs too much, and one blemish of a warhammer adaptation. But hey they wanted a license, they paid for it, they got it! Everything is in order. They make great games.

[nenjin]

Kind of a catch-22. You can't broaden the market for 40k games without taking a risk some shit ones get made.

That said, some licenses seem ill-advised. (I want to like Eisenhorn because it's a faithful adaptation of the book and lovingly done in some places. It's just a damn mobile game. What were they thinking greenlighting a game that wanted "real time" combat on a mobile device?)

But like....40,000 Armageddon? Had to the blandest, most boring 40k game I've ever played. For an IP known for visual bombast, it was literally Panzer General with some 40k-looking icons and some voice overs between games. Warhammer 40,000 Carnage, another throw away mobile game. Really GWS needs to quit greenlighting shit mobile games and focus on PCs and consoles. Don't even get me started about that 40k Chess Game.

For everyone few of those, you get a Battlefleet Gothic or Space Hulk Ascension, maybe. For every 10, you get a Dawn of War. (Which # you put at the end of that, I leave to you. For me, it's 1 and only 1.)

What just gets me is this: it's like GWS is still figuring out how video games work. Even after something like Dawn of War, whoever is licensing games for them is still hit and miss and they constantly seem to miss on the wrong kinds of games. I mean...fucking Chess!

[debvon]

haha 40k chess, that was something else