7 ms·

It's interesting that they only had a time-limited license to the music. I haven't played the game, but can any music be unique enough to justify its use with s

It's interesting that they only had a time-limited license to the music. I haven't played the game, but can any music be unique enough to justify its use with such undesirable licensing terms?

zokier 3y ago
> Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” is very iconic. and from publisher point of view this outcome is not all that undesirable, the continued sales of a over 10 year old single-player game presumably are fairly small.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  Is it so iconic that Sony should be allowed to collect royalties >50 years after the death of its performer?
  - GabeIsko 3y ago
    It's ironic that a song that is regarded as a war protest song is preventing the distribution of a war protest video game.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    Sony wouldn't do innovative stuff like host Woodstock if it wasn't for decades of royalties.
- breather 3y ago
  > is very iconic and trivially accessible for free (and in a much easier distributed format that doesn't pay the copyright holder at all) far easier than buying this game from a private store. Further evidence copyright and its licensing is moronic—it doesn't protect original content, it destroys it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
michaelt 3y ago
Presumably a time-limited license costs less. They can always just release a version without the music. This is a 12-year-old game, though, so maybe the sales don't justify the effort?
- t3rabytes 3y ago
  They might not still have the game source and/or knowledge on how to recompile the game. There are lots of technical reasons that it might be entirely unworkable to do that even if they wanted to. (disclosure: work in video games at a big studio where I know for certain there are things we couldn't build again at this point without a ton of work)
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    Has that situation improved at all? I appreciate many shops still cowboy code their way across the finish line, but I would think that big publishers might put more effort into ensuring digital preservation for potential remakes/ports/whatever. For example, it is not outrageous for me to believe that Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo would require source code/build pipelines/something for any release on their marketplace. Or do they just accept a binary from developers? That being said, I could easily believe that even if you had the game source code, there could be many additional bespoke toolkits, widgets, 3rd party binary libraries, etc all of which have their own inscrutable compilation process.
    - extraduder_ire 3y ago
      I think microsoft gets away with only getting binaries because they have a handle on the APIs you have to use for their consoles, so they can maintain backwards compatibility with a little translation, some shims, and the go-ahead from the publisher. Nintendo also has the advantage of other people writing emulators for their hardware that they can take advantage of years later, but only for first party stuff. (later ps2 game releases for the ps3 did something similar, with sony hiring a prominent emulator dev) I have to assume it's either licensing issues with toolkits/middleware or apathy that stops the release process being "ship us a binary and a docker container that can build it".
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Alas it seems a little too common in gaming. My favorite racing game Blur (played some today!) has an amazing licensed sound-track. The license expired & the game was taken down from online storefronts.
- vundercind 3y ago
  Oh man, same. I check every now and then for a sequel or remake or something, on newer consoles. Nothing so far.
stubish 3y ago
I'd say plenty of music is worth it. Music that comes with decades of history and subtext. Music that instantly puts the intended audience into the right headspace and makes them go 'woah'. But why would a developer go for worse music or higher costs when licencing? Apart from a small, niche audience there is no long tail on sales. Almost everyone who would ever want to play this game has played it, and any future sales would be for peanuts or as filler in bundles. I think my copy was free or next-to-free, part of some giveaway or bargain bundle. The rare games with legs get a remake to work on modern hardware. TV shows have a similar problem with music licensing. A number of high profile series from 90s and 00s are only available on old DVDs, as relicencing or even just redubbing with new music are not worth their effort. Nostalgia gains some sales, but it has aged and won't connect with new audiences.
- adastra22 3y ago
  It's absolutely insane to me that this is allowed. Music artists should have a right to charge for their work, but not in a time-limited way like this when the thing being created is timeless.
  - stubish 3y ago
    Yeah. My own manifesto is that once exposed to wider society, it becomes part of our culture and we the public gain some rights over the art from that. For reproducible art works, owners should be required to sell at a reasonable price, or others can freely distribute it. One side effect being you can't license a work for a limited period.
usrusr 3y ago
I could imagine that licensees for music in games ask for so wide a range of use cases and possible future distribution channels to be included in the licence, that licensors are genuinely scared that a forever grant would be almost like completely handing over the copyright. Licensees will want distribution over every future steam competitor, at any price point, in any form of package deal, remaster version, mod remix. Add gameplay videos and cloud gaming services, all far outside control of the original licencee, and the rights holder will find it almost indistinguishable from granting infinite transitive sub-licensing.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Time-limited licensing is the norm and has been for a very long time. Perpetual licenses are very difficult to negotiate in a way that's fair to anyone. From the copyright owner's perspective, the value of your work typically increases over time. You don't know by how much, but you do know that the only way to extract that potential value is to ensure you have something to coerce[0] your licensees back to another negotiation. Making licenses expire is an easy and obvious way to do this. Selling 'no-strings-attached' perpetual licenses is an extremely bad deal for you. Think about it like buying DVD boxsets (remember those?) vs. a Netflix subscription. If you buy the boxsets, that's it, you never have to pay for that show again[1]. If you subscribe to Netflix, you own nothing, meaning not only you have to keep paying for access to that show, but also that Netflix can jack up your rates and you'll pay them to retain access to the shows. Even if a perpetual license is made available, it might not be something the licensee actually wants. The above was written from the perspective of a successful artist, but there's a flipside: works that lose value and decay in cultural relevance. The vast majority of cultural works decay like this. As much as I'm bullish on games preservation, games are especially bad at retaining cultural value, because, among other reasons, we burn down the world every 5-7 years with new console generations. A lot of games developers - or at least their bosses - are perfectly happy buying a cheap 5- or 10-year license and then just... throwing their work down the memory hole when it expires. The amount of people still buying Spec Ops: The Line in 2024 is so low that the music license would eat up all the profits and the publisher would be in the red renewing it. Yeah, keep in mind too: all of these licenses are going to have minimum guarantees. When you license a copyrighted work, you're expected to pay a lot of money up front[2], purely for the privilege of having made that deal. Yes, you could pay a certain percentage of Steam sales, but this is almost always in addition to payment up front. First off, copyright owners don't like working with under-capitalized entities[3]; second, promises of future revenue are easily manipulated in ways that money showing up in your bank account isn't. The licensee has to open up their books and you have to trust that they aren't under-reporting copies sold. [0] In the gun-to-head sense. When you use copyright to extract supra-competitive (read: any) profit from licensees, you're using a little bit of the government's sovereign power. [1] Higher quality releases excepted [2] Anime licensing calls this a "minimum guarantee", I don't know if that's a common term in other creative industries. [3] The reasons for this are a complicated mess of elitism and business reality. Remember: the value of a copyrighted work is entirely in your ability to create demand for that work and restrict its supply. Licensing to anyone and everyone is contrary to this. Hell, game preservation as a whole is contrary to this.
ndriscoll 3y ago
This[0] wasn't actually used in the game, but it weirdly fits after a couple layers of irony (the game is very anti-violence and makes the point that you, the player, are a murderous psychopath who only needed to walk away the entire time). If you know the full context it's a confusing mix of funny and really dark. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvs7LZit3lQ&t=47 https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvs7LZit3lQ&t=47

It's interesting that they only had a time-limited license to the music. I haven't played the game, but can any music be unique enough to justify its use with such undesirable licensing terms?

zokier 3y ago

> Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” is very iconic. and from publisher point of view this outcome is not all that undesirable, the continued sales of a over 10 year old single-player game presumably are fairly small.

Ferret7446 3y ago
Is it so iconic that Sony should be allowed to collect royalties >50 years after the death of its performer?
- GabeIsko 3y ago
  It's ironic that a song that is regarded as a war protest song is preventing the distribution of a war protest video game.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  Sony wouldn't do innovative stuff like host Woodstock if it wasn't for decades of royalties.
breather 3y ago
> is very iconic and trivially accessible for free (and in a much easier distributed format that doesn't pay the copyright holder at all) far easier than buying this game from a private store. Further evidence copyright and its licensing is moronic—it doesn't protect original content, it destroys it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

michaelt 3y ago

Presumably a time-limited license costs less. They can always just release a version without the music. This is a 12-year-old game, though, so maybe the sales don't justify the effort?

t3rabytes 3y ago
They might not still have the game source and/or knowledge on how to recompile the game. There are lots of technical reasons that it might be entirely unworkable to do that even if they wanted to. (disclosure: work in video games at a big studio where I know for certain there are things we couldn't build again at this point without a ton of work)
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Has that situation improved at all? I appreciate many shops still cowboy code their way across the finish line, but I would think that big publishers might put more effort into ensuring digital preservation for potential remakes/ports/whatever. For example, it is not outrageous for me to believe that Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo would require source code/build pipelines/something for any release on their marketplace. Or do they just accept a binary from developers? That being said, I could easily believe that even if you had the game source code, there could be many additional bespoke toolkits, widgets, 3rd party binary libraries, etc all of which have their own inscrutable compilation process.
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    I think microsoft gets away with only getting binaries because they have a handle on the APIs you have to use for their consoles, so they can maintain backwards compatibility with a little translation, some shims, and the go-ahead from the publisher. Nintendo also has the advantage of other people writing emulators for their hardware that they can take advantage of years later, but only for first party stuff. (later ps2 game releases for the ps3 did something similar, with sony hiring a prominent emulator dev) I have to assume it's either licensing issues with toolkits/middleware or apathy that stops the release process being "ship us a binary and a docker container that can build it".

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

Alas it seems a little too common in gaming. My favorite racing game Blur (played some today!) has an amazing licensed sound-track. The license expired & the game was taken down from online storefronts.

vundercind 3y ago
Oh man, same. I check every now and then for a sequel or remake or something, on newer consoles. Nothing so far.

stubish 3y ago

I'd say plenty of music is worth it. Music that comes with decades of history and subtext. Music that instantly puts the intended audience into the right headspace and makes them go 'woah'. But why would a developer go for worse music or higher costs when licencing? Apart from a small, niche audience there is no long tail on sales. Almost everyone who would ever want to play this game has played it, and any future sales would be for peanuts or as filler in bundles. I think my copy was free or next-to-free, part of some giveaway or bargain bundle. The rare games with legs get a remake to work on modern hardware. TV shows have a similar problem with music licensing. A number of high profile series from 90s and 00s are only available on old DVDs, as relicencing or even just redubbing with new music are not worth their effort. Nostalgia gains some sales, but it has aged and won't connect with new audiences.

adastra22 3y ago
It's absolutely insane to me that this is allowed. Music artists should have a right to charge for their work, but not in a time-limited way like this when the thing being created is timeless.
- stubish 3y ago
  Yeah. My own manifesto is that once exposed to wider society, it becomes part of our culture and we the public gain some rights over the art from that. For reproducible art works, owners should be required to sell at a reasonable price, or others can freely distribute it. One side effect being you can't license a work for a limited period.

usrusr 3y ago

I could imagine that licensees for music in games ask for so wide a range of use cases and possible future distribution channels to be included in the licence, that licensors are genuinely scared that a forever grant would be almost like completely handing over the copyright. Licensees will want distribution over every future steam competitor, at any price point, in any form of package deal, remaster version, mod remix. Add gameplay videos and cloud gaming services, all far outside control of the original licencee, and the rights holder will find it almost indistinguishable from granting infinite transitive sub-licensing.

kmeisthax 3y ago

Time-limited licensing is the norm and has been for a very long time. Perpetual licenses are very difficult to negotiate in a way that's fair to anyone. From the copyright owner's perspective, the value of your work typically increases over time. You don't know by how much, but you do know that the only way to extract that potential value is to ensure you have something to coerce[0] your licensees back to another negotiation. Making licenses expire is an easy and obvious way to do this. Selling 'no-strings-attached' perpetual licenses is an extremely bad deal for you. Think about it like buying DVD boxsets (remember those?) vs. a Netflix subscription. If you buy the boxsets, that's it, you never have to pay for that show again[1]. If you subscribe to Netflix, you own nothing, meaning not only you have to keep paying for access to that show, but also that Netflix can jack up your rates and you'll pay them to retain access to the shows. Even if a perpetual license is made available, it might not be something the licensee actually wants. The above was written from the perspective of a successful artist, but there's a flipside: works that lose value and decay in cultural relevance. The vast majority of cultural works decay like this. As much as I'm bullish on games preservation, games are especially bad at retaining cultural value, because, among other reasons, we burn down the world every 5-7 years with new console generations. A lot of games developers - or at least their bosses - are perfectly happy buying a cheap 5- or 10-year license and then just... throwing their work down the memory hole when it expires. The amount of people still buying Spec Ops: The Line in 2024 is so low that the music license would eat up all the profits and the publisher would be in the red renewing it. Yeah, keep in mind too: all of these licenses are going to have minimum guarantees. When you license a copyrighted work, you're expected to pay a lot of money up front[2], purely for the privilege of having made that deal. Yes, you could pay a certain percentage of Steam sales, but this is almost always in addition to payment up front. First off, copyright owners don't like working with under-capitalized entities[3]; second, promises of future revenue are easily manipulated in ways that money showing up in your bank account isn't. The licensee has to open up their books and you have to trust that they aren't under-reporting copies sold. [0] In the gun-to-head sense. When you use copyright to extract supra-competitive (read: any) profit from licensees, you're using a little bit of the government's sovereign power. [1] Higher quality releases excepted [2] Anime licensing calls this a "minimum guarantee", I don't know if that's a common term in other creative industries. [3] The reasons for this are a complicated mess of elitism and business reality. Remember: the value of a copyrighted work is entirely in your ability to create demand for that work and restrict its supply. Licensing to anyone and everyone is contrary to this. Hell, game preservation as a whole is contrary to this.

ndriscoll 3y ago

This[0] wasn't actually used in the game, but it weirdly fits after a couple layers of irony (the game is very anti-violence and makes the point that you, the player, are a murderous psychopath who only needed to walk away the entire time). If you know the full context it's a confusing mix of funny and really dark. [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvs7LZit3lQ&t=47 https://youtube.com/watch?v=uvs7LZit3lQ&t=47