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Why some companies let Private Servers operate?
lestatgss
Member UncommonPosts: 1
I always asked myself how is there Private Servers of MMORPGs, when we have Copyright laws. Can someone explain it to me? I'm talking about unofficial games that copy story, names, classes and even the music.
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Post edited by Vaross on
Comments
Shutting down a private server is negative press. Take World of Warcraft for example. The recent shutdown made a lot of players unhappy. Several big name Youtubers were quite vocal about it. If you shut a server down, chances are a part of the player base will move on to another game.
Private server players may convert to live players. I know this was common back in Ultima Online days. Free to play was not a thing back then and MMOs were new. As such, not many people knew what a MMO was until a friend introduced them. People started out playing on unofficial servers (those were free) and later on moved to official ones. This may be beneficial for the developer.
It may not be a big deal. Most unofficial servers are not that big. If you have a game with 500.000 subscribers, having a 1.000 player server running is not that influential. Unless the server is harming your brand, you may keep an eye on it from a distance.
At least the players are playing your game. This is especially true lately, when there are so many games out there. If you are Ragnarok Online, you are fighting over every player you can get. The competition is fierce. Having a small unofficial server community means the people are playing your game instead of another one. Even if they don't convert, they may talk about your game and raise awareness.
On the other hand, there are reasons why it may be disallowed. I think every developer is aware of their unofficial servers. Some developers decide it is not worth the hassle to shut them down. Some decide the servers are negative enough to go after them.
BTW, Congrats on your one and only post.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
Otherwise a private server doesn't cost company anything, and it's free advertisement for their IP.
I play private servers on occasion but I still feel like there's almost no point. I honestly don't know why they are so popular with how fast they flip.
The main protection for games and other creative works is copyright. Art assets, quest text, source code, and various other things that go into a game are protected by copyright. Someone else can't use your work without your permission, but they can make an intuitively similar one--but can't directly copy anything from you in doing so. They have to recreate everything themselves. The point of copyrights is to make it possible to profit from creating things that are easily copied once completed, where the real work is in making the first unit. The creator has an exclusive right to sell the work for a period of time, and can try to make a profit from it in that time.
Trademarks, on the other hand, are less common and really only relevant to high-profile companies or IPs, as they're expensive to acquire. The point of a trademark is to protect your brand against customer confusion. For example, you can't create a hamburger store and call it Wendy's because someone else already has the trademark on that. If you did, you could confuse people who wanted a real Wendy's hamburger into buying yours instead, or into blaming it on the real Wendy's if you screw up. That protects both the reputation of the company and the customers who want to do business with them.
Trademarks really only extend to preventing customer confusion. You could create a hamburger store with a lot of products intuitively similar to Wendy's provided that you call it something else that makes it clear that you're not Wendy's--or Burger King or McDonald's or whatever. You could even open a completely unrelated business cleaning carpets and call it Wendy's (especially if your name is Wendy) provided that no reasonable person could plausibly think you were the hamburger chain. Microsoft has a trademark on Windows, but that doesn't stop companies that sell panes of glass from saying they sell windows.
Meanwhile, Apple and Samsung are suing each other over patents, which is something different entirely. Software patents shouldn't exist, and the fact that they do is really just a way that the courts haven't yet come to grips with modern technology. Regardless, Apple and Samsung are hardware companies suing each other over alleged infringement of hardware patents, not just software companies.
Unlike copyrights and patents, trademarks can last forever. So long as you're in business with a given name and keep defending it, no one else can copy your name and pretend to be you. But if Wendy's were to shut down and stop defending their trademark, the name wouldn't be reserved for their use forever; rather, others would be able to create their own hamburger store and call it Wendy's.
As has been stated, there are benefits to the IP owners if they take the proper steps to protect their rights. I would imagine that in the case of the WoW vanilla server either Blizzard was too concerned with losing there mega franchise or the vanilla server owners refused to post the document. Considering how hard the vanilla guys were trying to work with Blizzard, I would think the first possibility is the most likely.
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
If you pirate software to briefly make sure it works on your machine before buying it, or if you buy a legal copy of a game then play a pirated one because it's more convenient than fussing with the DRM in the legal one, then fine. But that's not what most piracy is.