For the GTA 5 VR and GTA VC ports, it’s understandable since it’s using copyrighted material.
The GTA 3/VC port wasn’t using copyrighted material though. You still need to own a copy of the game and bring over your own data files. It’s similar to how OpenMW allows you to play TES 3: Morrowind on your phone. Nothing was being distributed on their end.
The GTA 5 VR mod was filed under a copyright not licensing claim so it doesn’t seem like it was about the creators making money. Likewise you still need to own a copy of the game. There are conversion tools that target a multitude of games with the goal of converting them into a VR experience that don’t, to my knowledge, receive legal threats. It’s just that this project targeted Take Two Interactive games (it also worked for Red Dead 2).
This is a new game that was inspired by older games, the takedown sets a dangerous precedent. Imagine if every silent hill inspired game was sent a DMCA…
I agree. I feel like a significant amount of the games I’ve played recently are very upfront about being inspired by Resident Evil, Wasteland, or the STALKER series. I hope it doesn’t become an annoying hurdle for indie developers.
I think he was intentionally pretty vague about that. Maybe out of fear of landing in hot water. I believe Deep Silver Embracer Group owns the rights to the Metro video games and it might be one of those fuzzy situations where they are (somewhat) overstepping what they can legally do because a small project can’t afford to fight back and they are striking down something that could potentially be competition for something they might attempt in the future. A similar example of the latter being Take-Two Interactive taking down a GTA 5 VR mod or the source port for GTA 3/VC for devices such as the Switch and PS Vita.
I don’t think they wanted an exit because the game was slowly gathering attention online in the year leading up to this. I think it’s mentioned in a few articles it was their primary source of income and I don’t know if they have any other projects on the go. I imagine by now Paradox of Hope’s discussion page would have been updated if they did.
I intend to take all the accumulated experience from working on PoH and release a new game in the same genre, but without using the Moscow metro setting. I will also likely seek the support of a major publisher this time around to ensure avoiding copyright issues.
Maybe the publisher would be able to help them with that and encourage them to keep the Russian metro setting?
Thanks for the list. I was recently playing Limbo because it’s on the PS Vita and I know Doki Doki Literature Club is as well so maybe I’ll play that next. I also heard good things about Oxenfree before so maybe I’ll pick that up at some point.
I am wondering if the game advertised itself in anyway as inspired by the Metro series. I could see that causing potential issues but you are right. It does rapidly cascade if you take that approach.
The quote below is from an article with the author of the series and (TL:DR) they admit that they were inspired by the Fallout and Roadside Picnic.
I know Metro is a product of your environment, but I read earlier that you were inspired by the Fallout games…
Very much so by the first Fallout games. One of the sources of inspiration was Fallout 1 and 2, the isometric RPGs. And I was so inspired by Fallout when I was a student that once I went to cook my pasta and I was in such a hurry to get back to my desktop that I poured boiling spaghetti over my knees and luckily enough it was just inches away the most valuable thing that I have. That’s just to explain the extent of my passion for Fallout 2 back at the time. Also, not just that of course, but the books by the famous Soviet science fiction authors the Strugatsky brothers who wrote Roadside Picnic (Пикник на обочине), later adapted as Stalker and another work of theirs called The Doomed City (Град обреченный) which also has this incredible romanticism of abandoned urban spaces where you become the new master and you can explore the empty streets and empty buildings and everyone’s gone and you roam through empty apartments full of the belongings of other people. So this is something very romantic and very dreamy that can also be accounted for as an inspiration. And there’s some movies of course. There’s a very famous Soviet movie called The Letters of a Dead Man (Письма мёртвого человека), also about the post apocalypse. Altogether, that’s shaping your art references that inspire you. Then you build up on that and you become the inspiration for someone else and that’s how creative things work.
The Fallout games themselves were inspired by a multitude of works such as Mad Max, On the Beach, and A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World. There’s a PDF file out there that I believe was used during some kind of conference/convention talking in depth about this that I am struggling to find. It’s continued to do so throughout the series. I find this is most noticeable throughout Fallout New Vegas with many quest names and a chunk of dialogue referencing the material.
Kind of unrelated but interesting if you ever want to go down a rabbit hole you should check out how inspirational the book I Am Legend Is. It inspired The Omega Man and The Last Man on Earth and was incredibly significant in the creation of the zombie media going on to be the inspiration for Night of Living Dead.
then there are also multi-ending games which might take longer than a regular story game since you have to replay them.
That’s something I have a hard time doing depending on the game. Sometimes you can get a wildly different experience like in Fallout NV and see your actions having consequences while you play but a lot of the games I have been playing only are linear up until the ending cut scene.
I get what you are saying. I think it also depends on how the game is divided up. If it’s just one continuous romp with autosave points it can feel like it’s dragging on but if there’s clearcut levels and checkpoints I feel like it helps divide up a game into digestible chunks.
I feel like that’s not really present with a lot of open world or sandbox games