Person B has released a high-quality, popular fan game using secondary, unimportant characters from Company A's 10-year-old commercial game. Company A decides not to pursue the action.Ģ. It will cost Company A $10,000 to sue Person B, but Person B's fan game only prevents 2 sales a month due to its obscurity, and thus Company A would only redeem $80 monthly in lost profits by filing the lawsuit. Person B is making a free fan game using artwork based on Company A's commercial game. If a game company is going to take someone to court for doing a fan work, they generally won't bother unless the game company will see a net-gain in profits versus the cost to sue the person, or to protect their trademarks from abuse they don't want to see.ġ. The question ultimately becomes, "Does the owner of the copyright have a problem with it?" Technically, ALL fan-work is illegal without express permission You're doing something based on someone else's copyright. Obviously, I'm just saying it's one reason you don't see game companies suing the thousands of producers of fan games out there. The "but it is free publicity" is not a valid excuse in a court. ROMs are illegal, no question, but Super Metroid Classic is not a ROM, it's this Allegro-driven game: Fan games turn out to be free advertising in a way, so why bother stopping them? (IE: Using artwork but failing to mention the owner of the artwork copyright.) Fan games generally don't hit a large enough base of people for the game companies to pour money into stopping them, especially since it would be very hard to claim damages, and such fan games help to promote the nature of the real games in the first place. Most game companies don't have problems with people making fan games, so long as they don't try to sell them, steal detailed content from the real games such as level layouts, or claim the work as their own. The legality of the game is no different than fan-art or fan-fiction. Timorg seems unaware of the fact that "Super Metroid Classic" is a fan-remake of "Super Metroid", not a ROM.įan-made games are just that, fan-made games.
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