News
Not Paying Their Fair Share
Cordova, TN; July 27, in the year of our Lord 2015--Family
Friendly Gaming, the industry leader in covering the family
friendly video games is getting political on the topic of video
game companies not paying their fair share. The video game
industry has seen a new trend in recent years. Video game
companies are selling the tools they use to make video games to
consumers. They then let gamers use these development tools to
create wonderful, cool, and fun new levels. The video game
companies share the user created levels with everyone and brag
about how many levels that have been created for the games they
are making money off of. Guess who gets paid nothing for their
work? That’s right the gamers. The consumers. The people who
paid for the game, and spent all of that time and effort
creating levels. After all those levels are their copyright. Why
aren’t the video game companies paying for the levels?
It dawned on me recently that these video game companies are
doing less work and getting more profit. They can talk their
fanboys into working for them for free. Of course they do not
use those words because they are playing a shell game and do not
want investigative journalists like myself to notice how they
are abusing their own base. These companies are stealing from
gamers. They are pirating your copyrighted material. How long
before someone sues one of these video game companies for this
theft? I can see a judge asking: “So you profit from their work,
and paid them nothing for it?” See how bad that looks for the
video game companies releasing tools and making money off of
your hard work? The real question is: how much longer are you
going to let them abuse you? When will you stand up for
yourself?
Another aspect of this is we can see how easy it is to create
levels for these games. The video game company executives are
constantly telling us how much they have to spend on development
costs. Their words seem to ring hollow when we see how quickly
and easily new levels can be created. This would not be the
first time video game company executives were caught lying.
Which begs an interesting question. Why hasn’t there been a
firestorm of controversy when these video game company mouth
pieces have been caught lying? Doesn’t the video game industry
expect more? Do you honestly expect these company
representatives to lie to you all the time? Maybe some more
video game journalists should focus on these issues.
God bless,
Paul Bury
Family Friendly Gaming