Steam seemingly tired of sneaky malware and working with FBI to do some counter-measures.

#Steam@GameDEV
#Malware@GameDEV
#Legal@GameDEV

Krafton lost the case against Subnautica 2 director and ex-CEO Ted Gill. The court orders the publisher to re-establish roles of the founders and give Ted full control over the Unknown Worlds studio and the game.

The case was rather confusing from both sides, but the judge sided with the CEO as his arguments were more consistent and reliable. The seizure of the company and termination of rights and roles of founders were done without legal grounds.

The case is not over though, they will have to settle next steps and compensations. But even now the judge extended the term for the game to earn the required sum for founders to get bonuses.

#Krafton@GameDEV
#Legal@GameDEV

YouTube is getting worse and worse

- They can detect 3 seconds of music
- They can't detect scammers in his comments
- So, let's remove 13.8m subs channel!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXO1RMn8qBs
#YouTube@GameDEV
#Legal@GameDEV
#Music@GameDEV

After their parent company Nacon admited they are out of money, their subordinates followed with the same legal request.

Paris-based studio Spiders is perhaps best known for working on the Greedfall franchise. Kylotonn has spent recent years overseeing the World Rally Championship series, while Cyanide has worked on franchises such as Styx and Blood Bowl (via).

#Nacon@GameDEV
#Finance@GameDEV
#Legal@GameDEV

Did it happen? 😧

#meme@GameDEV
#Legal@GameDEV

And Nintendo's controversial patent is no longer valid. They have some time to appeal but I assume they will not get it anyway.

For context: they are not the authors of the idea, the gameplay feature has been used before them. This case is so bad that it caused changes in the patent office itself.

#Legal@GameDEV
#Nintendo@GameDEV

Italian TV channel La7 does it all the time and YouTube (at least before) gave zero fucks: they use videos made by other people (and downloaded by La7 from YouTube without consent), then upload them to copyright system and strike EVERYONE. This time it was NVIDIA.

#NVIDIA@GameDEV
#Legal@GameDEV
#YouTube@GameDEV

A Japanese crowdfunding platform sent less than a half of the money to the game developer. So he's suing them over it while they pretend "the money were accidentally wired to a wrong client". Then failed to prove it.

#Legal@GameDEV
#Finance@GameDEV

Since Krafton lost the case against the founders of Unknown Worlds, they were also removed from Steam page of the game.

It's not yet clear how it unfolds, Krafton still owns Unknown Worlds to a degree. But they may have been locked out from any control over the game.

Before the company made a deal that included a huge royalties for the studio founders if Subnautica 2 meets the quota.

To prevent this from happening, Changhan Kim, the CEO of Krafton rejected his own lawyers and listened to Chat GPT instead that helped him to file a claim, took the studio from founders, and then lose miserably in court.

#Krafton@GameDEV
#Legal@GameDEV
#Subnautica@GameDEV

Apparently, indie developers from Russia lost the last bank that supported Steam, thanks to EU sanctions. So, being a publisher is nearly impossible from Russia now and people expect shady middleman services to appear.

And simultaneously Russian government built cases against all major game companies for "storing users data in unsafe countries" = i.e. not in Russia. And despite promises that "there's nothing to worry about", blocks were already tested this spring for all these companies.

The second part means that soon it may become harder to promote services that help gamers to top up Steam wallets and get gift cards for consoles.

#Laws@GameDEV
#Legal@GameDEV

And here's the second side of why it will not work: since prices are slowing down the whole damn economy, they are going to be treated as illegal and artificial and companies will either be fined or lower them back.

#Hardware@GameDEV
#Legal@GameDEV
#Laws@GameDEV