EA's Tetris games will no longer be playable on iPhones and iPads
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
> Last year, The Tetris Company, Inc. and N3TWORK announced a multi-year agreement where N3TWORK will be the exclusive developer and publisher of new Tetris® games for mobile devices worldwide, excluding China. EA’s announcement that it will retire its Tetris®, Tetris® Premium and Tetris® Blitz games as of April 21 is a result of this agreement.
Kind of surprising they don't have recourse to rebrand/retool the game.
[1] https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2012/06/tetris...
I should note that it is possible to patent game mechanics, and there are various patents owned by them, and also other developers of Tetris games. None of these cover the core mechanics of Tetris however.
After reading about it again/more, I think it might be that people are reading a specific line of reasoning about merger doctrine as applying to copyrightability in general, when it's actually only addressing one part of the overall question of copyrightability and is still accepting that mechanics can't be copyrighted per se because they're functional. But this is still an impression and not something I can rigorously argue at this point, so be sure to consult your lawyer before writing a Tetris clone, I guess.
What if they had not added this in their TOS? Can N3TWORK force EA to break their TOS?
[1] from the article:
> But buried deep in the games’ terms of service, EA has made it clear that the company only has to give notice 30 days before terminating one of its services.
IANAL but in most jurisdictions I expect EA would not have lost the case and most likely no one would have taken the case. The TOS avoids the risk, though.
Long ago, we'd buy video games, and the multiplayer servers might eventually go offline--- but the single player modes were offline. Now, for nearly no technical or gameplay reason, we have games that require connecting home for singleplayer, in turn allowing game publishers to arbitrarily yank the rights to the game.
Massive EULA aside, what does "purchase" mean anymore, and do customers have a reasonable understanding of what transaction they're entering?
1. Henk Rogers creates a company called Blue Lava Wireless, and his other company Blue Planet Software gives them the right to make a few Tetris games. 2. JAMDAT, a publisher of mobile games buys Blue Lava Wireless, and also acquires a 15 year exclusive license to publish mobile Tetris games. 3. EA buys JAMDAT later in the year, along with that license.
Can you guess the date JAMDAT bought BLW? April 20, 2005.
The Tetris Company is very protective of their brand, as they should be. They make a crap load of money from licensing it to publishers, and having exclusivity just ramps up that price.
3 days ago all of EA's Tetris games were delisted from App Stores, while some may have assumed the games would have remained up at least until April 21st. My theory is BPS and N3TWORK saw this as an issue, no Tetris on the App Store, and needed to answer to it, so they paid EA to delist early, and released their barebones Tetris game.
N3TWORK (who BPS has invested in) also has another upcoming Tetris title called Tetris Royale. It's already available for the New Zealand region, but playable anywhere if you're crafty.
I'll admit, I honestly have no idea what it takes to develop, test and launch a top-tier game for mobiles, but we're talking about Tetris. And this particular version is as minimal as it gets.
I love Tetris, so I really hope they add some cleaner skins without the odd faux 3D effect and fix the controls before their battle royale version comes out.
Eschew the clones, your pay supports the game, they said.
One of these days, they'll realize that isn't always a good thing.
The people who paid for the game on the App Store won't end up with what they paid for.
Hope that's clearer.
That's what you got.
Thanks but no thanks
I use my iOS devices to read books I side-load (libgen and Calibre), read comics and listen to music I download from private trackers and to browse the web.
A little while ago, before the end of 32-bit, I wanted to read it again. But the app was barely functional, it didn't accept certain touch inputs.
From one user review:
> Hadn’t played for quite a while, so was surprised when they announced that after April 2020 the game wouldn’t be "available to play". Turns out they wrecked it a while back by making it so you can’t play offline (why? - for years it worked fine offline).
Apps may be able to delete apps remotely (I believe their mobile device management tools allow companies to push policies like that[0]), but to my knowledge has never done so. Amazon has pulled books back from people’s Kindles and many platforms have removed content from being redownloadable.
0 - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicemanagement/r...
Also I don't really follow any Tetris forums or anything so I don't know how people reacted when it shut down but I was amazed it shut down since they sold mtx skins and I assume that they didn't transfer any of it to Tetris 99.
One app that I bought on the app store for 60€ just refused to start one day if I didn't buy an additional annual subscription.
When I complained to Apple, they just told me to contact the developer.
They take 30%, but they don't care one bit if what they sold you actually works.
Now add that you can’t even be sure that apps you “purchased” will continue to be available.
The app store model is broken, there’s also zero chance that I will buy anything from any app store anymore. I’ll download free apps that solves a problem, like buying a bus ticket, but that’s about it.
Apple does give a crap about the quality of their app store, as long as there’s no porn and you both directly steal, they simply do not care.
On the Mac, as on Windows, you could just keep using an old app for years. It didn't matter if the developer bothered to update their app for the latest OS, you could generally just keep using apps that you bought years ago.
Products must be of acceptable quality, that is:
- safe, lasting, with no faults.
- do all the things someone would normally expect them to do.
In May 2010, lawyers representing The Tetris Company sent Google a Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violation Notice regarding Tetris clones available for Android.[15] Google responded by removing the 35 games listed in the notice as it was legally obliged to do, even though, according to one developer, the games contained no references to Tetris.[16][17][18]
In February 2011, The Tetris Company continued to make copyright claims against independently developed Tetris clones, most notably against Tetrada on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The developer, Mario Karagiannis, rejected the claims of copyright infringement on the grounds that copyright does not cover gameplay design, but still removed the game, citing lack of resources to fight what he called "bullying".[19][20]
A US District Court judge ruled in June 2012, that the Tetris clone Mino from Xio Interactive infringed on the Tetris Company's copyrights by replicating elements such as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks.[21]
Why is this still going on in 2020? Is the copyright on a falling blocks game concept never going to expire? This is a poster child case for why current copyright law is harmful to everyone.
Whole thing is rotten to the core. Megarich proponents arguing that copyright in its current form encourages competition is about as laughable as megarich proponents arguing for trickle down economics.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i...
The game rules? No.
They're a smart business, and very tactical. I think when they do decide to drop the hammer on someone it's because they know they can win.
They also don't do it if they don't need to. If you beat them in a search engine ranking, you better believe they'll come knocking.
The thing is that they don't have copyrights on playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks, since those are actually functional elements of the game. However, they have been able to protect their brand by claiming that these things fall under trade dress.
What they've argued in court is like Ford saying that Chevy infringed on their trade dress by also using wheels, an engine, a steering wheel, etc.
DMCA is a bad copyright-related law, but it's not the core of copyright law