Let's start the text by making it clear that I do not share the idea that copyright and intellectual property simply do not exist and should not be respected. My problem with intellectual property is another.

Personally I don't mind if someone takes something I've made and makes something based on it, as long as they give me the copyright. Like, if you want to take a game I made, improve it and put it on your channel, good luck, but don't forget to put my name in the credits, now, if I'm selling that product you're based on, it might be more interesting partner with me, then both of you profit, you know? So, by having this more liberal policy with my own products distributed for free and this policy more open to negotiation with any paid product that I make available, I see myself fully entitled to criticize large companies that abuse extensive copyright legislation, crushing small independent developers for making new things out of old products they don't even use anymore.

Now imagine the following situation: you are a developer and you spend eight years of your life creating a remake of Pokémon based on games that Nintendo practically left in oblivion, and, one fine day, you receive a letter from Nintendo saying that you can be sued. for use of intellectual property if you do not remove from the internet any build, code or page you have created regarding the game. This is how the developer identified only as Adam saw an exceptional quality ROM Hack turn to dust in front of him even though Nintendo itself doesn't make a significant profit from the sale of original Game Boy cartridges (which aren't even produced anymore). Nintendo's policies regarding abuse of copyright laws go to the extreme for Nintendo sueing a 3D modeler for creating a digital model of a replica of a character's penis (remembering that Nintendo never published anything related to Organs sexual organs of any character, so the model was 100% original and the use of character should fall into fair use). This type of policy only alienates potential content developers and producers and reduces the amount of fan-created content for that purpose.

In fact Nintendo itself forgot that it entered the game world in violation of Universal's copyright, but it , conveniently, never remembers this when an amateur developer comes up with the revolutionary idea of making a Mario game with completely new mechanics...

Thinking about it, I decided to bring here some interesting points to think about the current situation of copyright in the internet era. Remembering that a game, a book or a movie are products, and when one loses the "hype", the amount of people willing to buy it. In this situation, the most prudent thing to do is to change your strategy, and this is what many companies don't seem to understand.

Abandonwares

Think of games like Donkey Kong, released in 1981 and which practically does not generate more profits for the company. As it hasn't been 70 years since the developers died (probably not even dead yet), they can still sue you if you share or sell the original game or recreate it in other media. But Nintendo itself doesn't give a damn about these games. These are the so-called abandonwares.

Abandonwares are a set of software, games and any other media that developers don't give a damn anymore, even though they are still protected by copyright law. This can include classic games such as The House of The Dead (1998), Lemmings (1991) and even the games in the Dune series, which "inspired" the Warcraft series of games (exactly, dear Blizzardminion, there's little to stop the first game in the Warcraft franchise from being called out loud as plagiarism), these are all games that after a while were abandoned and forgotten by time. But the internet doesn't want good games to die, and it is to supply the demand for these older games that communities that distribute these games, such as My Abandonware and Abandonia, emerged. Is it piracy? Yes. But so what? Often companies don't give a damn about these games, even throwing away their source code during crises or shutdowns. As there are people today willing to maintain or even improve these games, do you think it is fair to simply let these programs disappear in the middle of the ocean of data that exists today in such a way that it is never possible to recover them, even if only partially?

Advertising

Old games are essentially an advertisement for the new ones. Old games that you let the public share and update are even more than an advertisement: they are a legacy.

When Blizzard put on their downloads page the games Blackthorne, Rock'n Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings for download, I confess that I was thrilled . These are games that I played on SNES emulators on the internet (which Nintendo was pleased to take down), that brought back good memories and that even defined my taste for games and continue to influence today.

Of course, there are controversial actions by Blizzard, which, instead of improving World of Warcraft, preferred to close several servers of old versions that fans preferred, including one with more than 800,000 registered users and at least 150,000 active, or processing into millions of dollars players who create pirate servers of outdated versions of their games. These are extremely idiotic actions, considering that these servers not only serve to attract people to the official servers but also do not profit from a product that the company is actually selling, as is the case of people who distribute pirated games a few days after the official release.

At least Blizzard learned from its mistakes and successes regarding its policy and has been sporadically distributing some of its games for free, such as the classic Starcraft.

Reverse engineering

Big projects involving reselling old games would hardly be possible without large doses of reverse engineering and the pro-abandonware community that exists today. DOSBox, for example, only exists today because a group of developers created an emulator compatible with MS-DOS and PC-DOS, because if it depended on Microsoft and from IBM, you would have to port games that may not even have the source codes today.

The same is true of groups that patch old and no longer supported games. Fallout 2, for example, already had several unofficial patches back when it was "in the fridge" developed exclusively with reverse engineering, without the project's source codes, manuals or documentation. Other projects, such as Wine, have done something more impressive: they have managed to create environments that allow the execution of software that would only be allowed on another operating system.

And what do you do with these devs? Will you prosecute everyone who submitted a commit to the Wine project for piracy? Will you process who runs programs on Linux using Wine? Are you going to sue the guy who fixed a bug in the game you never updated again? Reshape your business process, fix problems and provide the service your community needs. If you can't do that, at least don't get in the way of those who supply the demand of YOUR public that YOU were responsible for supplying.

Some healthy alternatives

There are some healthy alternatives that you can do with your old game that still has your name on the scrawled copyright paper and that can improve your profits in the long run. Read my proposals and reflect on them in case you ever become a game developer, so as not to be compared to a certain Japanese game developer company of an Italian in overalls:

Licensing

Think for a moment about two companies that have been producing computer games since the early 1990s. One of these companies decided to distribute the copyright of its work to developers who were willing to pay a small fee to access the rights to use material derivatives, while the second preferred to prosecute anyone who did anything that was even slightly similar to its product.

While this policy is unusual in games, it already exists in other areas, such as movies (with Disney buying studios so they can profit from old works), books and even software. Using Unity3D to develop your game is no different from using the framework of someone else's book: you're taking someone else's work and giving it to other people to do whatever they want (paying your project subscription, clear).

You can also fractionate your game and sell just the assets (pieces of art, music, and code to be used in games). Can you imagine other people taking your assets from a game you can't even sell anymore and doing something that could be worth millions of dollars? This will also bring popularity to your company, make no mistake.

Sale

Even old games can still be sold easily. GOG came up with exactly this proposal, selling classic games, like Diablo with the unofficial Hellfire expansion and the first two titles in the Warcraft series. Steam itself has interesting titles such as Hexen: Beyond Heretic and Doom. Selling an old game is never a bad idea

Distribute your game for free

Make no mistake, free game distribution policies make people more interested in your new games. That's what happened to me with Blizzard, and more recently with the game Shadow Warrior, where I found the original version of it on Steam for free, and later I ended up buying the remake.

In fact, even piracy has a similar effect, attracting popularity to lesser-known games. There are even companies that legally give up the intellectual property of games from the MS-DOS era just to be able to profit from other more current games from the same company or franchise.

After all, if you don't make the same money with that, why not redesign your business model?

Make it open source

Although Doom is still commercially available, its source code is officially available on the internet, as are several other id Software titles. Making source codes of old games available to the community is always interesting, because it can serve to find competent developers to make an eventual remake.

A message to the fanboys

Yes, man, for sure you keep talking about how good Nintendo is and how silly and ugly fans who make fanmade games are will cheapen the price of your official port of Super Mario World for Nintendo Switch by only 12 installments of $19.99 will make it even cheaper if you report them to the company, go for it.

Please stop beating the shit out of a starched bureaucrat who never even touched a line of code. These guys are forcing people to throw years of their lives in the trash for nothing, and I'm not just talking about devs, but streamers, 3D modelers, painters and many other artists. You're not winning the cheapest game, you're just losing the chance to see the game redesigned by a person who made it out of pure love and affection.

And what do you think about it, dear reader? Leave it in the comments.