Fan games and selling... GBA cartridges?

Games Business and Law Business

Started by DakeDesu October 19, 2006 08:38 PM

11 comments, last by yaustar 17 years, 5 months ago

100

Author

November 02, 2006 11:54 AM

Well, I've talked to a few people who have researched Canadian Copyright, Patent and Trademark Law, (which is quite a bit different from USA Copyright Law), and we came to two possible civil charges Nintendo of Canada could lay on us:

1) Using the bootloader code
loophole a) You cannot copyright or patent code in Canada, there is another section of Canadian Law, that I am not knowledgable on that covers software. It is not a well known piece of law either. I am very sure I could get a judge to reasonably doubt I willfully broke it.
loophole b) In the states, a company has won a case against Nintendo blocking rights to the bootloader code. I cannot remember if it was Acclaim, Accolaid or Midway. I shall see if I cannot FAQ including the information.
2) Mentioning in some way that it is not an official Nintendo game.
loophole a) Take Nintendo's red code. shift it by ten values (Nintendo cannot own _all_ shades of Red, and I am sure a Judge would recognise how silly that would be), take the square nintendo is in and remove the rounded corners replacing then with nonround corners. Replace the Nintendo text with "DOUJINSHI*". Put text on the box that says something to the tune of "*: Doujinshi literally means fan based works, and is not associated with any company other than the studio that made it". Then to show whether it is for Wii, Gamecube, N64, GBC, GBA or NDS, a silly cartoony stylised image that would tell the user what it is for.

As for Nintendo's Seal of Quality saving the game from the second game crash. To be honest I am surprised we haven't had a third game crash already. However, I must have missed the part in various game histories how the Seal of Quality saved Nintendo. I shall read up again. Any links you suggest.

However, if it is true I could develop for Microsoft for 100$USD a year, than I am more than willing to scrap this plan. The question is: is this SDK available for Linux?

jpetrie

13,220

November 13, 2006 08:20 AM

Quote:
However, if it is true I could develop for Microsoft for 100$USD a year, than I am more than willing to scrap this plan. The question is: is this SDK available for Linux?

What you're talking about is XNA. It's a C# framework that allows "near effortless" porting of a Windows game written to the XNA framework to the 360 (however, it is still in beta at the moment and you cannot target the 360 until after the beta).

The SDK is free, but to target the 360 you must be part of the XNA Creator's Club (or some such), and that costs $100/year. Furthermore, it is not a viable platform for sale -- it is not possible to distribute binaries, and only other XNA CC members can play your game (and they basically have to recompile it, because of the aforementioned binary distribution restriction). More up-to-date information can be found on Microsoft's own XNA site; it may contradict some of what I've said as I won't follow XNA too closely until its out of beta.

It's a very cool platform, however, it is not really an avenue for amateur developers to target the 360 for for-profit distribution of games.