SquareEnix kills Chrono Trigger Fangame at 98% completion

[roushimsx]

I think the creator should just comply with "fuck you Square" and take the 150,000 fine. If every Chrono Trigger fan paid a dollar towards that fine, then well over 150,000 could be paid. Fans wouldn't be paying for the game, they'd be paying the fine.

I'd like to live in the fantasy world that you live in. Chrono Trigger fans wouldn't kick in $5, let alone $1 to help the guy out.

[Lil_John]

Yeeeeeaaaaaah!

[kainemaxwell]

This is extremely disheartening.

[Sonicwolf]

Funny how a company sits on a license then legally attacks the hell out of someone when a fan game is made...

Why dont you dimwits actually make a new Chrono Game then? derp de derp.

[TonyTheTiger]

As somebody who works on his own intellectual property (and has studied copyright) I fully understand Square's position. There's a quality control issue as well as a market saturation issue.

There are a few thought patterns going on here.

One is that if these people actually put out a good game, will fans move toward it and possibly ignore other products that SE has on the market right now? You can't stop another competitor from putting out an original RPG and possibly drawing away fans, but if you can just send a letter and stop someone from using your own IP to do so, even if it is free, then why not? Hey, if that person gets really good feedback, tons of downloads and people offering to pay money for him to make more games, then SE just gave a blessing for a new potential competitor to rise.

The other is that some people might get confused and think that it's an actual SE product. If the product is no good, then that could reflect badly on SE as people still associate the IP with SE. If SE does decide to put out another Chrono game, then it will have the black mark of a game that they didn't even create.

Either way, I think the C&D should have come SO much sooner than this. Receiving a letter like that when you're less than a month away from completion must have been heartbreaking. The actions almost say that it's not enough for SE to stop the action, but that SE intended to utterly crush the spirits of anyone involved with the project.

This.

I do think that waiting this long sounds fishy but that's assuming Square knew about the project. And even if they did wait on purpose, I think what they're doing (and it makes sense from a resource management and PR angle) is letting people have their fun but once it appears that a real release of something legit looking is imminent they bring the axe down. If they went after every single thing the second it got started they'd seriously waste lots of resources fighting against bullshit little things and also pushing away a hell of a lot of people.

[Leo_A]

It would still require a Chrono Trigger ROM to work, so it's still IP infringement.

I don't like it, in fact I think it's fucking bullshit by Squeenix, but it's their property and it's their right to defend it. Even if they're fucking twats about it.

Forgive me if I missed someone else saying this, but just make it be a patch for the Chrono Trigger rom. No ip infringement then if the end user is the one combining it with Chrono Trigger and it just happens to work...

[Jorpho]

Forgive me if I missed someone else saying this, but just make it be a patch for the Chrono Trigger rom. No ip infringement then if the end user is the one combining it with Chrono Trigger and it just happens to work...

The thing is, the developers put a rather explicit clause in their readme stating "Hey, this is illegal!" Never seen the likes of it before, and can't imagine why they needed to do that.

[kedawa]

So what's stopping the people involved from just finishing it and quietly releasing it?
I just don't see how Squeenix could do anything about it.

The same is true for any similar fan project.
They just need to be careful about what they publish on the web.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Forgive me if I missed someone else saying this, but just make it be a patch for the Chrono Trigger rom. No ip infringement then if the end user is the one combining it with Chrono Trigger and it just happens to work...

It's still illegal. Like someone releasing a crack for a valuable piece of software. The crack on its own is useless, and doesn't do any damage until it's actually used -- but it doesn't make it any less illegal.

So what's stopping the people involved from just finishing it and quietly releasing it?
I just don't see how Squeenix could do anything about it.

They can backtrack the owner of the site by going after the host, and get the guy's billing info that way. And work their way up from there.

It's not as simple as "ZOMG RELEASE IT NOW".

[Leo_A]

As far as I know, it wouldn't be enabling piracy, what exactly about it would be illegal if theres no IP protected work in the file? It would be no different then than someone creating a map for a online fps or a track for a PC NASCAR game, which the last I heard weren't illegal to distribute or create even when the developers didn't encourage it and the community had to figure out how to do it.

Others have done similar things to get around IP infringement, such as with the Star Fox 2 patch to translate, correct bugs, and hide the debug menu. Only the end user is committing piracy by downloading or having the rom to the game.

[Kitsune Sniper]

The difference between that is that those games usually WANT people to create their own content by using the game's materials and can even provide tools to do so.

You can't compare a legal mod, supported by a game's creators, to a romhack, which is illegal from the start. You're modifying the game's code, not adding to it without altering the original game (like said maps and levels).

[NayusDante]

I'd like to live in the fantasy world that you live in. Chrono Trigger fans wouldn't kick in $5, let alone $1 to help the guy out.

I would be glad to donate $5 if such a fine were actually imposed.

Chrono Trigger is one of those wonderful exceptions to the need for an illegal rom. Anybody got the FF Chronicles release? Try booting "ROM.BIN" in an SNES emulator. You legally own that rom, without the need to download it illegally. It also opens perfectly fine in Temporal Flux, the most comprehensive CT rom editor that I know.

If there's any rom that can be hacked legally, it's CT.


However, there IS validity in SE's claim. The hack would include references to the Chrono Trigger story, characters, etc. Technically, it's just like fan fiction, but both make use of content that the author does not own the rights to.

If you were to make an ORIGINAL game out of CT, I'm not sure if SE would have a claim. The patch file you distribute would only contain information related to changes in the file, which would all be original content that you have ownership of. Making a legal claim on that would be akin to Nintendo suing a paint company because I spraypainted my NES.

[Leo_A]

As I tried to make clear with my post, even games where this isn't supported by the developers and there are no resources provided to figure out how to do it, such as creating new tracks for Papyrus' series of PC racing titles, aren't illegal or haven't been acted upon.

You've yet to state how a patch that alters the game code, as long as there's no infringing use of IP protected material in the patch, would be illegal to release. What law would that fall under? The developers aren't doing any IP infringing. From my experience, things are legal if they take the forms of a patch and they're not distributing a patched rom (The PC racing simulation community has had legal issues when a exe is modified to do something like simulate a different racing series and then distributed, but when its just a patch that the end user must run that modifies their exe on their own hd, its been fine).

I suspect a similar parallel can be drawn to the emulation community, and is probably why others have done similar things with translation patches and such for many rpg's for one example.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Looks like I'm not going to convince you regardless of what I say. I will say this, though:

I've been romhacking for more than seven years. I've released patches for several games. And the moment a company tells me to stop, I will, because I know full well that what I do is blatantly illegal. I have no legal grounds to stand on. If a company doesn't want me to do this, then I'll stop.

The fact that I'm only releasing a patch doesn't matter. It's just like a crack comes out to make a demo version of a game into the full one -- it's ILLEGAL because it will modify the game code, because that is its only purpose.

This isn't about fighting THE MAN. So stop complaining about the game not being released. It's a shame, yes, but unless the team wants to end up in court or in jail, what's the alternative?

[Leo_A]

That's illegal because its enabling piracy and there's no other usefulness of it. I'm not sure you can draw a parallel between that and a patch for a rom.

[Kitsune Sniper]

It's still an unauthorized game modification. What part of "unauthorized" is so difficult to understand?

Squeenix owns the game, Squeenix doesn't want anyone to fuck with their property, Squeenix throws lawsuits around to ensure this doesn't happen. This isn't about the patch being useful, it's still illegal.

[Leo_A]

We'll have to agree to disagree, I'm not sure there's a law that prevents unauthorized modifications to a videogame. I've seen no evidence of such a thing unless it enabled piracy. I've only seen evidence that supports my position, such as the Game Genie lawsuit Nintendo brought against the company producing them in the early 90s.

[Jorpho]

As I said above, even if by some reading of the law such a patch might not be illegal, the authors said in their own readme, "This is illegal and we'll have to stop if someone tells us to," or words to that effect. Like I said, a bit odd.

[Griking]

We'll have to agree to disagree, I'm not sure there's a law that prevents unauthorized modifications to a videogame.

Pretty much every End User License Agreement that comes with every piece of software (except open source stuff) makes it clear that you can't make modifications to the software. It's pretty much a standard condition to using any piece of software.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Pretty much every End User License Agreement that comes with every piece of software (except open source stuff) makes it clear that you can't make modifications to the software. It's pretty much a standard condition to using any piece of software.

I'm pretty sure he'll say it's not "law", therefore it's not enforceable with fines or jailtime, even though it is.