Community Roundup – Issue #23

It’s been a while since the previous issue was posted – which is not to say that there haven’t been things worthy of sharing. It’s just that our own little game is set to ship in a couple of months, and so instead of writing newsletters we’re busy balancing out the skills and traits that a character gets if, say, she was imprisoned for a year (–1 Health, + interest in Battle Magic, +20% Streetwise, if you wondered).

From this week onwards, however, somewhat regular newsletters are going to be a must as Alma starts the engines on the prep work for Summit 2019 – and we’ll get there in the next issue! But first, some community news.

I know that some of you have already bought this book, but for those of you who haven’t – it’s officially out, available via Amazon (here’s links for US, UK, DE sites). Thanks to the generosity of FKKS, all of the finalists of this year’s Legal Challenge will receive a copy courtesy of the firm.

You’ve probably met Gaetano Dimita at one of the earlier Summits. His university-directed event, MTJG, is set to have another edition in Frankfurt on October 19 – in partnership with Beaten Burkhardt. If you’d like to attend, feel free to reach out to another Summit guest whom you probably already know from the event: Andreas Lober.

If you were to buy some Tencent stock during this year’s Summit, you would be more than 20% down right now. If you were to buy some CD Projekt RED stock during this year’s Summit, you would be more than 40% up right now (they have no job openings for in-house lawyers at the moment, if you wondered, but there’s a ton of positions for animators and programmers).

The chief reason behind the falling stock price of companies such as Netease, Capcom, Nexon, etc. seems to be the news out of China – first, game approvals are put on hold; and then there’s a broader change that affects pretty much every games company that books significant profits from the region:

As this article in Bloomberg reflects, it would be short-sighted to take this news as bad for Tencent only. At a certain level of growth, everyone is affected by what happens in China – just to a different degree. The very same CD Projekt RED reports around 10% of its revenue as coming from "Asia + Russia”, which seems to leave a lot of potential for growth there – except that maybe now, growing your games business in China will take longer and become even less certain.

On the subject of China, there’s a great recent article that underlines the same thing that we kept hearing from all the games companies who do business there:

It’s one thing when new games are not getting approved for 6 months because of reason X, whatever that reason could be; and it’s quite another when literally nobody knows for sure.

If you consider your own games company to be in an underprivileged position, as an outsider – don’t be so hard on yourself. Some weeks ago, even Tencent’s president Martin Lau publicly explained how Beijing’s bureaucracy hurts his company.

So at the end of the day, it’s not really about Western companies not understanding the new rules, but rather about pretty much everybody not understanding these rules.

The whole article is here.

Imagine being a part of the Tencent/Bluehole business team that has to work out a way forward for PUBG PC in China…

Here’s a quote that may apply to what we have with the games industry in China at the moment –

– however, it’s from an article about the Chinese film industry. If you think that dealing with game approvals is complicated, consider having to deal with the state going after film celebrities and their suspected tax evasion in order to make a public point out of that – while you’ve got projects that depend on those specific individuals.

The full article is here.

Some years ago, there were was a case in Russia when news sites reported “a suicide due to playing too much of [GAME]” (one of you, dear readers, should remember this case well). What they left out is that the guy was binge-drinking vodka for several days straight, which ended with him shooting himself with an illegally owned military weapon, so perhaps he could have been watching dog shows on TV all this time, with the same end result.

With power comes the responsibility, and with fame comes all sorts of crap from the tabloids. In the case of Daily Mirror (pictured above), there’s a bonus: apparently, the author of this specific piece is known for looking to frame games (“Pokemon Go is ruining my marriage”) for all sorts of problems as long as games seem to be popular enough to merit a large-font headline. Details here.

At the same time, there’s a bunch of great stories from people who have very positive first-hand experiences with Fortnite, for example this thread:

In the recent weeks, Riot Games kept getting into hot water on a regular basis. From an article that was 6 months in the making and detailed their internal process as “unfair to women” to blogs of ex-employees who tried to address the issues of “rape jokes” being made by the company’s management, and to male attendees complaining about being excluded from Riot’s PAX workshop on getting into the games industry.

I’m not posting any links here because, ultimately, it all comes down to the same old truth about any creative business: sometimes, the management of games companies are not the most pleasant people to be around; and when in-house legal and HR teams are weak, or is prevented from addressing such issues (ref. Riot’s CEO shutting down their Head of Legal in front of everyone during a group meeting that addressed the problem), the whole thing is eventually going to blow up in public.

At this year’s Summit, we discussed a (very real) situation of what should the legal team undertake when one user makes a credible threat of violence towards another user, or a dev team member, on the forums. From Wargaming’s story about the gun owner who just got out of jail and wanted the dev team to do as he says, to the story of Jagex’s moderators dealing with the proposals to shoot the management, take over the company and make a better sequel, the focus has been on the line past which the in-house legal team cannot afford to just stand back and let the situation develop.

It would be good if in 2019 we could expand on the topic and talk about how the legal teams can help their companies with the prevention of some very real conflicts internally. At one of the companies where I worked, management once told an employee that he should divorce his wife – because his commute to her house is too long for him to get enough sleep. Now, in a small company this is just a stupid thing to say, but in a multi-billion company that’s a possible lawsuit. Can the in-house legal teams be counted on being there to raise red flags in such situations, or this is the domain of management exclusively? Let’s talk more about this when we meet in May 2019.

If you’re in-house at one of the global games companies and you deal with Europe, chances are that dealing with Belgium is somewhere on your to-do list. The country may bring under 1% of the global games revenue, but its ruling on the free-to-play mechanics had a far mightier impact.

Tech companies like Facebook and Google, in general, are known to follow the strategy of “expand now, defend your position later” and may pretty much ignore the on-the-ground reality – considering the (possible but not certain) penalties to be a small price to pay, later, for the (immediate and shareholder-pleasing) progress, now. After all, being fast and having no preconceived limits is what made them successful in the first place. When Uber was under stress in Paris, they did not hire more compliance lawyers or GR specialists – they hired more defence lawyers for those drivers that got arrested.

As to the games industry, we’re not really there – because our customer base is more tangible, and we want to keep making money with the same properties for many years to come, and pretty much everywhere. Lose in Belgium – and Norway may come after you. Lose in Norway – and Germany will skin you.

At the same time, very few companies bothered to connect legal and software development in a way that would make it easy to offer different game modes to users in different regions. Valve’s vision for Steam, for a long time, has been that of “one market, one user experience” for everyone. You may be able to launch an app in Canada through Apple ahead of other territories, but for a Steam release, you are very strongly advised to run things globally – a launch should be a launch for players everywhere, from Shanghai to Lima.

All of this results in a challenge that, I think, is still not fully recognised by the global games companies: that if you want to wade in dangerous waters of (possibly exploitative) F2P mechanics, you’d better be ready to offer as many regional versions of your game as you possibly can, and tweak each according to the local rulings.

Take NBA 2019, for example – a product that’s at no.1 on Steam’s Topsellers list. As of this writing, it sports 65% negative user reviews, which is pretty exceptional (and not in a good way). It would be one thing if users simply raged about not having enough new features, but they seem to be as much – or even more – pissed off by the presence of micro-transactions in this $59.99 product. As one of the reviews spells it out –

The hundreds of negative comments on the game’s Steam forums indeed are focused as much on the hardware problems and lack of expected features, as on the publisher’s desire to milk users from the get-go for more cash.

While I disagree with the conclusion above – I would rather say, “like a bad free-to-play mobile game”, – in general it’s hard to find any love for the product. Chinese players hate it. American players hate it. Swedish players hate it. Something has got to give, and sooner than later folks will start writing formal complaints to their local consumer rights organisations.

All of this is is to say that, looking back, Belgium seems to have become our industry’s collective conscience: the region might be small, but it seems to still be able to detect certain problems with aggressive game mechanics earlier than others – and force games companies to make the consumer-friendly changes that, eventually, are bound to spread like the requirements to disclose probabilities of drops and the rules on playtime limits that are being copied off Korea’s advanced regulation.

Finally, the last piece of news for today is that Discord – a communications platform that grew to over 150 million users thanks to player communities and games companies actively promoting it as the most convenient tool for chat and tech support – decided to shoot itself in the foot by announcing plans to directly compete with Steam, GOG, Humble, WePlay, Itchio and all the other digital distribution platforms (full statement is here).

There are several reasons as to why this seems like a stupid idea:

The points above hurt even before we move to the logistics of the whole thing: from the current complete lack of developer tools that could allow content creators to launch and update their games on Discord to the lack of platform’s experience in dealing with multiple currencies, chargebacks, partner tax interviews and refunds…

The good news, though, is that the expected launch of this new store seems to be delayed, so maybe whoever was looking at the shot foot of the platform, was able to convince them that selling paid content is a bit more complicated than supporting free chat servers.

With the news above off my chest (at least for a while) and the other news not public yet (I know that some of you, my friends, won a case in the US court last week – congrats!! – with the help of other friends, who are also a part of this community), here’s the action plan for the coming few days:

The next issue of this newsletter will carry all the updated information, as well as the hotel map (and special rates so that you can compare them to what’s available elsewhere), and around the same time Alma and I will start approaching you one by one.

Have a great day – and stay safe if you’re in NC/SC this week!

/S.