“For a bunch of hairless apes, we’ve actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things” —Ernest Cline, Ready Player One It’s an incredible time to be alive. The Digital Age has helped us reached levels of efficiency and connectivity that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. In his award-winning…
What do videogames, cigarettes and slot machines have in common? They’re all addicting, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Since addiction and legal liability can sometimes go hand in hand, game designers (and app developers) would do well to pay attention whenever a new habit or hobby looks like…
Cloning is the process of creating a video game that is significantly motivated or inspired by an existing popular video game or series. Developers have been cloning popular video games since the 1980s, including Tetris, Doom, Minecraft, Bejeweled and Flappy Bird. Often, game developers create clones in an attempt to…
We predicted last year that 2016 would be the year of Pokémon. This prophecy came true last week within just two days of the Pokémon Go launch. The location-based augmented reality mobile game/app quickly surpassed Tinder in daily users and neared Twitter’s totals (and as of yesterday, surpassed them), with…
Patents related to games are facing new challenges for being too “abstract,” but a recent court ruling highlights the limits to this line of attack. Last year, the Supreme Court reinvigorated a body of law that defines the types of inventions eligible for patent protection. Generally, inventions deemed “abstract” are…
In 2016, Niantic will blur the lines between our world and the world of Pokémon with the release of Pokémon Go, its upcoming augmented reality game for mobile phones, which will allow fans to see and interact with Pokémon in the real world. Similar to its AR game Ingress, Niantic’s…
Due to efforts by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Library of Congress adopted in its recent guidelines a limited exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), allowing gamers and preservationists to modify a video game to restore access to the video game for “local gameplay.” Specifically, a video…
Continuing the trend in recent years of injunctions becoming harder and harder to obtain, the Northern District of California denied a motion for a preliminary injunction where the defendant has allegedly copied the plaintiff’s video game source code. Despite finding a strong likelihood of success on the merits, the judge…
With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) (also called drones) anticipated to become a multi-billion dollar industry in a few years, many are betting that drone gaming will explode as the next big thing in competitive entertainment. It is not hard to see why: with the aid of first-person view (FPV) headsets…
A weekly wrap up of interesting news about virtual worlds, virtual goods and other social media. What’s the Matter With Zynga? This was supposed to be a story about a guy building a highly anticipated mobile game. Instead, it’s a story about a multi-billion-dollar Internet company that is…