Comment by jfengel
10 hours ago
Do they need to put some funds in escrow? Or will they just shut down the entire company and let the players sue for it. (I know that big publishers won't do that, but I'm sure the lawyers could create shell corporations to solve that problem.)
Or they could just demonstrate that they have an offline play capability right from the moment they sell it.
The entertainment industry has a long history of making successful movies appear unprofitable on paper to avoid paying royalties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
The massive battle Peter Jackson had with the studio after none of the LoTR movies made a "profit" was very telling.
Oh, and it's even an example in that Wiki article you linked lol
From the movie "Bowfinger" [0]
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131325/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_acc...
My favorite example of this is when Warner Brothers said that Malibu’s Most Wanted wasn’t profitable because they spent so much money marketing Harry Potter that year.
That’s not how things work as far par as participating on the back end of a specific project (which is contractual, not entity based). Thats a profit /loss sharing entity setup for legal accounting reasons (the entity files taxes). Generally not even required since the studio does this at their corp level. Even LLCs will pass these through. This would likely be do some partner/investor.
The contracts that celebrities get on adjusted gross (adjusted is doing 100x the work of the word gross in this context) have no specific entity revenue in mind. If costs show up later after some cash has been distributed, people absolutely freak out to give money back, so you need an arrangement that works such that that doesn’t happen.
Plenty of agents over the years sold celebrities the idea of gross on first dollar and couldn’t be bothered to read the proposed contract which led to many publicized lawsuits.
One good option could be to make the distributor (like Steam or Play Store) liable as well. They would then have an interest on making sure that publisher/developer holds up on their side of the deal.
For example they could require that they provided with those EOL patches/sources when game is released, require liability insurance in case of bankruptcy etc.
Step 1: Open LLC dedicated to this specific video game title.
Just make the punishment the seizure and full release of the game assets (all source code, version control history, tooling, and release of copyright/trademarks).
It's always going to be a wild goose chase trying to take money when there isn't any (actually or by design), just take the product and let the public update it as a last resort.
It doesn't really matter how they comply, so long as the punishment for bon-compliance is serious enough to motivate a good-faith attempt. I'm wary of jumping right into encoding specifics into legislation. That said, I'll be surprised if this actually has the necessary teeth.
Bankruptcy is a universal get-out-of-punishment free card. At least, if you're a corporation large enough and foresighted enough to shove your liabilities off onto a fictional subsidiary before starting.
If the bankruptcy process already involves identifying and administering the company's assets, I feel releasing the server software (as-is) to owners of the game could be part of that.
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Why not? They'll spin a new LLC for every title and leave it empty shell, without capital to be recovered by the users should they sue.