Its products are more popular than ever and are progressively more sophisticated, to many it offers the perfect career and by 2022 the revenues are expected to top $230 billion. We are talking, of course, about the gaming industry, where highly skilled individuals use creativity and technical know how to produce masterpieces such as Player unknown’s Battleground and Dragon Ball Fighters. Behind all that creativity, however, lies a cutthroat world of business and so here we look at the legal side of the gaming industry.
Gaming Industry Contracts
As with any other tech business, finding the right people to get the job done is paramount and so too are the contracts that they enter into with their employee. As the industry thrives on ideas and the technical skills to be able to bring them to life, protecting those ideas is crucial and so clauses like non-competes are essential when it comes to drafting a contract. So much so, in fact, that having this work done by an expert law firm such as DWF is standard practise throughout the tech sector.
A non-compete clause prevents employees from setting up on their own and using the ideas from the company they have recently left or from taking them to competitors.
Intellectual Property and Patents
Whilst non-competes are a good way of stopping employees from using your company’s ideas, they don’t stop them talking about them and this is where patents come in. Patents are a way of protecting intellectual property (IP) so that ideas and other types of IP can’t be used without payment and/or permission.
Patents are an extremely complex area of the law, particularly when it comes to buying and selling them and so again expert legal guidance is required if they are to be handled effectively.
Regulatory Issues
It is only right and proper that the gaming industry is regulated in order to protect consumers and particularly the interests of younger gamers. Rules regarding the type of content are one of the most important to the producers of the games as these to a large degree dictate the size and type of demographic that the product can be aimed at or sold to.
Legal and ethical factors need to be closely supervised if a given product is to reach its full potential, both in creative and business terms.
Companies from the gaming industry who attempt to operate without expert legal counsel run the risk of either losing their ideas or losing out on profits and in either scenario that could mean game over.
