Category: Videogames

The full version of Halo 4 has leaked and opportunistic people are selling Xbox 360s — with the game preloaded — on CraigsList. Kotaku’s Evan Narcisse did some honest-to-goodness (and high-quality) journalism on the matter. He interviewed some of the sellers and found a wide variety of justifications. None of them were very good. Disappointingly, though not surprisingly, these sellers will surely find customers.

Let’s be honest. I’m sure that most of us have pirated a song or a movie at some point. While it’s a bad practice, one of the common justifications cited is that pirating a movie/song doesn’t necessarily mean a sales loss for the publisher. In this case, Microsoft is definitely losing sales. People that spend a lot of money to buy pirated copies of Halo 4 almost definitely would have purchased the game legitimately.

Piracy-for-profit is just bad news. If it becomes more rampant (and I think it will) then companies — big and small — will tighten their belts. While some pirates justify taking advantage of large corporations like Activision and Microsoft, the people making “normal” wages at these companies will be the first to suffer. If people sell pirated versions of games developed and published by medium- and small-sized companies, the ramifications are even scarier.

That’s my take on it anyway. What do you think of the Halo 4 piracy-for-profit deal? Will this develop into a bigger issue for several companies? Or do you think it’s no biggies? Definitely check out Evan’s article when you have a chance. It’s one of the best pieces of videogame reporting I’ve read all year.

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[Update: 9:01AM PT] Have you amassed a large YouTube following and earned some sweet ad dollars by posting clips of your dazzling Halo runs? If so then prepare to have your revenue stream shut off because it seems that Microsoft isn’t down with having people profit from posting clips of its games. Digital Trends has found a clause in the company’s updated “game content usage rules” that restricts gamers from earning money from posting videos of Microsoft games. Check it out:

Microsoft grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use and display Game Content and to create derivative works based upon Game Content, strictly for your noncommercial and personal use.

While this doesn’t stop people from creating and posting well-edited and clever videos of Microsoft games, it does prevent them from making money on such clips. It’s a curious move. Certainly there will be some outspoken gamers — particularly in the large Halo community — that will scream at the large corporation “mistreating” its fans. Microsoft also gets free marketing from people that put together slick clips of its games. While I understand that the company wants to control and protect its properties, this seems like a bad move on several levels.

What do you think of Microsoft’s new restrictions on gameplay videos?

Update: Here’ s part of a post from the Halo forums that clarifies the new rules. According to a company rep, nothing has really changed:

The majority of everything the community makes currently is fine, as long as they are not basically running a big Halo-based business or using Halo as if the IP was its own property. That actually isn’t a change to our policy, simply a clarification and update of the dry legal language, and as we’ve mentioned, even that “new” language was actually updated months ago. We don’t have squads of lawyers waiting in the wings to go after folks making machinima, or showing off their skills in Halo. Basically it’s business as usual.

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