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And I think both Square and Nintendo have more than made their money back on those franchises. A 20 year limit on copyright would not have prevented Nintendo fr
by skywhopper 13y ago
And I think both Square and Nintendo have more than made their money back on those franchises. A 20 year limit on copyright would not have prevented Nintendo from making The Legend of Zelda.
- jrs99 13y agoOnce a developer makes their money back, the game should go public domain. Nintendo would still be able to make tons of Zelda games, it's just that there would be good competition with several hundred other studios making Zelda games. They would probably even do a better job than Nintendo and make the top-selling Zelda games.
- dllthomas 13y ago"Once a developer makes their money back, the game should go public domain." This is reasonable as a design goal, if you're taking into account risk (I make 10 games, only one meets any success - is the cost of development the money invested only in the one game or also in the other attempts that - for whatever reason - didn't catch on?). I'm leery of it as a hard and fast rule, because it is way to hard to say what costs actually are (/ should be).
- jrs99 13y agoWe could already have maybe 10,000 Zelda games out by all kinds of creative publishers. Think about the amount of choice you could have if we had this rule in place. Zelda games could be a buck each.
- dllthomas 13y agoYes, I wasn't arguing for a stronger copyright - I'm very much on the other side of things. I'm just trying to be sure our discussion is informed by all the relevant facts (in this case, that overwhelmingly franchises do not endure but some do).