"Never Work With Movie Franchises" Laments Quarter Arcades Boss As Ghostbusters And RoboCop Cause Issues

And MGM was bought by Amazon. ^^'

Yeah, licensing in games always seems to cause no end of faff — particularly when trying to re-release anything.

I believe that licenses for specific games should expire at some point, if the game's not for sale anymore.

Having to first trace the trail of mergers, buyouts, studios going bust, and who owns the game rights now, coupled with "Who owns the rights to the original IP now?" for licensed games, which can get just as complicated, makes repacking/rereleasing older games based on TV/movies ludicrously complex.

Just draw a line, if a game hasn't been sold in some legit way for 10 years or so, that game becomes public domain, that might push companies to keep games accessible through ports themselves, too. (To "Reset the counter" on it)

You can't just push intellectual property into public domain after 10 (!) years only because the rightful owner who paid for it hasn't done anything with it that resulted in a finished product. That's why Emulation - though often not completely legal - is ultimately saving more games from obscurity than companies like Nintendo are willing to admit.

@SlangWon
12 years or three systems!
That should be the mandate for games going public!

Movies/TV shows should be 5-7 years.
There's a couple of dudes who bought the rights to some movies just to have the rights and not release them.
Then there's a few who did but ask way too much for releasing them, so instead, now they get nothing...

I've pointed out in the past that some games are licensing nightmares and the Ghostbusters situation is a good example of that. There can be a lot of paths to go down to bring a game out. It's probably trickier when there is a current exclusive console licensee, though that might not be as big of a problem for these arcade cabinet replicas.

The early versions of Revenge of Shinobi would be another licensing nightmare, though at least they basically did various sprite hacks so the game can live on.

@MysticX It had to do with how the original contracts to get the games made in the first place were made.
My understanding is that movies negotiated licensing and stuff to permanently own the rights to sell them.
Video games and TV shows were surely made on lower budgets and probably negotiated ownership to a time-limited deal to get a far cheaper rate, since they were usually made with a much more throwaway commodity mindset.

@SlangWon Long ago, somehow 28 years was determined ideal copyright length.
Until someone like Disney came along.

@SlangWon Steamboat Willie: Can't I?

@RobertPayne556 Steamboat Wilie was published in 1928 and entered public domain in 2024. What are you trying to say?

Until someone solves this intellectual property bs, say it with me:

Emulation. Saves. Games.

@SlangWon Who owns Mickey Mouse? Connect the dots.

@Spider-Kev This would be ludicrously complex and everything would fall apart in court with cases dragging on for years. Not every piece of media fits into a neat little category. There are albums released on game cartridges, movies on game disks, interactive movies, DVD player games.

You could put all media in one box of rules, but good luck getting a law passed when Hollywood, record companies, and the video game industry team up lobbying.

And if you jump that impossible hurdle, good luck getting judges who understand the nuances of technology and media.

And if you get past that impossible hurdle, the industries will just cheat.Once a year for a 3 day period, release a “special digital collector’s edition” $100 for a single movie. Or hide a game away for sale without announcing it on some unknown platform. Or keep everything available on a platform no one wants to use. Keep it in a physical location where their actual data archive is and charge people $500 to go in person to view. They will do anything to horde the data, but not have to incur costs of hosting the data for people to view. Letting people host themselves is a loss of control which is unthinkable for these industries, and it also means they can never pull on these old things to reuse again and again, and instead have to innovate.

Also not sure how IP would work. Currently there is no official Winnie the Pooh canon. Doesn’t really matter for that series. How about Dragon Ball? Every fanfic is now just cannon? That could destroy franchises. People would lose interest when they didn’t know which way to turn their head.

It’s just a mess and I am sorry I didn’t bring solutions. Only gloom

"Never work with movie franchises, as well."

Or try to get a license that has less hurdles. I mean I could have told you that Robocop would be a difficult one to work on.