As well as a form of art and entertainment, games are about business. Whether you want to work at a game studio, start your own business or make games as a hobby, recognizing the dynamic landscape of the videogame industry is critical to finding your place. This course will introduce you to game production, project management, teamwork skills, and how to position your game ideas and yourself in the broader marketplace. By the end of the course, you will be able to develop an impactful portfolio of game work to get noticed and/or develop an effective business plan to bring your game to market.
The reality is that making games isn't just about art and creativity, though sometimes some of us wish that were the case. All art has economic considerations. Creative people need food, shelter and safe creative spaces to work within. Thus, one way or another the question of the economics of games is going to prove important. So understanding the flow of money in the game industry, as well as how to protect your own ideas will prove paramount in being able to make the craft of making games an economically justifiable activity.
Transferring ownership, right?
You can transfer a copyright from one person to another, okay.
You can also rent or land or license copyrights.
That's how to a large extent, right?
Licenses are granted to certain kinds of software, right?
You are granted a limited license to it so that you can make use of it.
So copyright's pretty complicated, and in games it's really complicated.
So, copyright protection exists, right, the moment an author
fixes an expression in a time and space, right, in an intangible medium, right.
And so, for the most part, the emphasis in games has been placed on things like
source code, right, when it gets saved out to disk.
You've fixed that in a tangle space, right.
It's on your hard drive or
maybe you've sketched a piece of artwork in your sketchbook,
right, or you've drawn something in Photoshop and saved that file.
You own that, right?
That's your copyright.
You have some element of copyright protection there.
Now, you can actually register your copyright with the U.S.
copyright office, right.
So the benefit of that is that it grants you sort of statutory damages for
copyright infringement.
And most people don't do that, but copy right exists regardless if you registered.
Because you fixed your idea and so that's an important thing to keep in mind, right,
that right now as you are making things, as you begin making
games here in this class, you have copy write over those things, you own them.
It is important to note this is copy writed not copy written.
It's kind of a semantic thing.
But it's important to keep in mind, because they're different things.
So what's the public domain?
What does that even mean?
Because inherent to copyright is the idea that things eventually
enter the public domain and the same is true for patents.
Public domain is an idea that intellectual property is no longer protected
by copyright, and so what does that mean?
What's in the public domain?
Well, you can actually place things in the public domain.
Some things already exist in the public domain, so here in the United States,
any published work that occurred prior to 1923 is public domain,
meaning that it's free to use.
So you can take a story that existed before 1923 and
you can use it to make a game.
And you don't have to license anything from anyone.
That's not entirely true, because maybe you're Disney who is exceptionally good at
taking old ideas from works from prior to 1923 and altering them and
making them their own, and so make sure that you're actually using the original
thing from before 1923, not the thing that Disney adjusted or revamped, right.
So lots of folk tales get rewritten in movies and film because they can, right?
Because they're public domain, but that new expression is covered by copyright,
so that's important to keep in mind.
Any published work before 1963 that was not renewed before 1978 so,
that, the idea became that well people can
renew their copyrights if they're sort of still alive and living and breathing and
working on a thing but that eventually things should enter the public domain.
That was the idea at least.
It changed once corporations became the owners of an intellectual property.
Another example would be any work that was published without copyright notice prior
to March 1, 1989.
So before that moment, anymore, people have to sort of mark their documents and
say, hey, I'm claiming copyright over this thing.
And so If somebody had released something, and they hadn't put that in there.
Well, yeah, it entered the public domain.
And, the other important part of this is, so,
if you're familiar with open source software, or the idea of copy left,
the idea that I want to assign things to the public domain is increasingly common.
All right, and so the author can really dedicate things to the public domain.
If you're using artwork, right,
it's possible to look at game art that has been released under the public domain.
Another important piece of this is, at least in the United States, work created
by the US Federal Government is released to the public domain, largely speaking.
One of the things that I find really interesting about patent documents
is because they're public documents, they're in the public domain.
So you can go look at them, right, and can't necessarily use them to make money,
but they're public domain documents.
That gives you something to sort of look at.
Now, it's important to also know that the creative commons and
royalty free items are not the equivalent of being in the public domain, right?
The Creative Commons is different, right, because it's copy left, right.
Like, it still remains copywritten.
It's just been done so in such a way that the ideas to have sort of
again a creative commons, a way to licensing.
So, inherent to this idea of copyright is the idea of fair use.
What's fair use?
Well, fair use is the idea that you're sort of making
limited use of a copyrighted material for very special purposes.
Maybe, it's promotion of free speech.
Maybe, it's for learning.
Maybe, it's for scholarly research, or maybe you want to have a discussion about
something and you need to be able to illustrate something.
So if you're posting on the forums, and you post a screen shot of something,
that's an entirely reasonable thing, right?
Because it falls under fair use.
One, this place is educational, two, maybe you're having a discussion about it.
And so those are important things to keep in mind,
is that fair use is inherent to the idea of copyright.
Now, there are lots of guidelines for fair use, and you can read some of them here.
But I don't wanna talk about a wall of text, because fair use is really variable,
and it depends upon profession, right?
And ultimately, the definition of fair use is one based on that of practice, right?
So, if it is general practice within a profession to use something
in a certain way, that can be defined as fair use.
And so, we actually get to control what fair use means,
collectively as professionals and that's an important thing to keep in mind.
So, right because your students here on Coursera's platform, right,
is that you can incorporate copy written material into your work but
you can only do it within reasons, right.
You have to credit the sources You have to display the copyright notices
of those people, right.
So if you are using somebody else's copywritten work this is going to become
real cumbersome, right.
The only things I would really recommend would be things that
fall in the public domain or creative commons.
If your distribution is limited, if you're going to put your thing up on Kongregate
that's not limited distribution.
You're putting it out there so don't do that.
But, if you're just kinda playing with it, and trying to figure it out,
there's no problem taking whatever it is, and putting it in your game.
But really recognize that you're gonna have to change that,
and you should really pay attention to the idea of fair use, all right, and
think about that doesn't say that you have to, but
it's gonna make your life easier because the last thing I would
wanna see any student experience is getting sued for something like this.
Or at least getting a takedown notice.
And ultimately if you wanna take something from here and use it for a non-educational
purpose like making money right, suddenly it's not protected by that student clause.
If you're trying to make money it changes the game.
You know the spartan logo that we use on these videos all the time?
Got to get permission for it.
Even we have to worry about these things.
So with that, we're gonna launch into some other forms of intellectual property.