The doujin fangame industry -- what do we know about this elusive animal?

[FaustWolf]

Didn't want to go on a tangent in the Chronotorious thread, so I guess I'll migrate some of my recent musings to a new thread.

Anyway, during the Crimson Echoes C&D controversy the concept of fangame licenses were mentioned from time to time. I dismissed it as an outlandish never-before-tried concept at first, but then OneUp Studios' Chronotorious album got me thinking about the possibilities.

I pondered whimsically on how awesome it would be if there were a company that did for fangames what OneUp Studios does for fan music. And then it hit me -- this really has been done before. Even with Square Enix. I'm pretty sure we've discussed this particular case before, but I'm not sure we did so in the context of the debate over fan activity that followed in the wake of the C&D the Compendium received.


Anyone know of outfits like EasyGameStation in the English-speaking world? Or would the folks behind The Silver Lining be the closest thing to it? Are there cultural or legal differences that make this sort of thing either impossible or extroardinarily improbable in the West? Or is only the lack of precedent standing in the way?

It seems to me that possibilities for English fangames abound in this economy marked by megacorporate game producers that are struggling with hugely overbearing production costs and development times. Game producers are accumulating and hanging on to more intellectual properties than they have the resources to handle -- certain properties end up just being left completely untreated. And yet at the same time, the Chrono community and other fan communities have amply illustrated that untapped demand still exists. I imagine there's also huge amounts of untapped game-producing talent among the community of would-be amateur game designers. It's a true market inefficiency.

I'm just interested in exploring what all's happened in this fledgling industry, and whether it's even fledgling at all.


EDIT: Just realized I forgot my own first rule: when you have a question about something, check Wikipedia first, because Wikipedia has teh great isightz. Here's an entry on the doujin game industry as it exists in Japan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C5%8Djin_soft

The industry as it exists in Japan still does not have the protection of licensing it seems, unlike OneUp Studios' venture in fan music. EasyGameStation might have even been selling their product completely under the radar somehow. Hmm. I wonder if any doujin houses operate with the promise of licensing fee and royalty profits for the IP holder?

EDIT: Great article here.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_44/266-Doujin-A-Go-Go-Baby

[mav]

The brunt of why doujin soft or doujin games "get away" with using existing characters from various intellectual properties is apparently because the IP holders either turn the shoulder to 'em or are wowed enough to give them official releases (like Ragnarok Battle Offline).

I'll have to continue reading on this, but it just seems that there isn't a large enough base of fans and amateur developers to warrant help from other communities; i.e. there's no OneUp Studios for fan games because there appears to be little demand for it. That article from Escapist Magazine seems really enlightening though, so I'm gonna read through it and hopefully it'll at least help me better understand the doujin scene.

Great topic FW.

EDIT:

[Doujin games] also present an interesting case of IP management, as most games adapt universes and characters from either professional licenses or other doujin games without permission, yet this recycling fuels new interest in the original IPs and, therefore, isn't seen as a plague but on the contrary, as [good]. Doujin softs are home to great genres that have been abandoned or marginalized by mainstream companies, such as shooters, fighters, brawlers, the importance of good writing, and 2-D representation  ... and porn adventure games. As most of these successful doujin titles are not free, they prove a viable economy can exist around niche products that target their audience intelligently, even in the [risk averse] game business."

I wish Chaz, the author of this quote, would elaborate on why these doujin games can still make it though. That's the problem--how there's a sort of lax status elsewhere and not here. Is it a cultural thing? Is it dependent on the companies themselves? What the hell is going on? Doujin music, manga, art, and even hentai can make it, yet doujin games get shafted. Blah.

[FaustWolf]

Yeah, I think I was totally misunderstanding the Japanese doujin game industry when I first started this. For example, EasyGameStation may very well have hauled off and made that Dewprism/Threads of Fate fangame and even sold it without permission or a license. That would easily land someone in court here, so it may have a lot to do with cultural considerations; and I'd be willing to bet that Japanese IP holders are pushing for tougher copyright enforcement over there nowadays.

I've done some digging into US copyright law, and from what I can see there's definitely no loopholes that would ease the way for a fangame studio startup. With music things are a bit different due to the existence of the "compulsory license" -- if you can't find whoever holds the rights to an audio track you want to rearrange, you just file a request with the US government and pay a fee & royalties as stipulated in law. Sounds like something a startup fan music studio could exploit to cut their teeth on, by reimagining some impossibly obscure work.

There's no such thing as compulsory license for most other types of media (I'm not even seeing one for books, which would presumably enter the Public Domain anyway, and I assume the rights to just about every gameworthy classic novel/short story have been bought up by some corporation by now).

So it seems a hypothetical "fangame studio" would absolutely have to negotiate directly with the copyright holder in every conceivable instance. The chances of hearing "yes" are obviously slim, especially since the whole concept as I'm imagining it is untried and the profit potential for the copyright holder totally unproven.


So the problem as I understand it is, the theoretical, world's first-ever American or European fangame studio needs something to cut its teeth on and prove the concept's worth, but has no opportunity to do so unless a copyright holder is incredibly, incredibly generous and open-minded. The typical corporation?...Not so much.

What I *could* see happening is a US or European financier negotiating a license with some artist of an original intellectual property (be it videogame, anime, manga, book, film, etc) who has inspiring and gameworthy material but is down-and-out on his or her luck as far as breaking into the professional market, or maybe has broken into the professional market but the property got drowned out amongst other properties, and therefore might be less costly to license. Preferably the source material artist would be from a third-world country where the US Dollar or the Euro would have a comparative purchasing power advantage, thus placing the property within the amateur Western financier's budget (say, <$100,000 to purchase the license). I haven't been able to find what kind of licensing costs The Silver Lining folks had to pay, so I'm not sure whether this is unrealistically undershooting the possibilities or unrealistically overshooting.

That's quirky and unorthodox and ignores international licensing dilemmas that could crop up. However, getting past all that, if the source material were electrifying enough to gather professional-level amateur talent and the resulting videogame sold enough low price downloads -- hard copies are out of the question due to printing costs, and piracy would play heavily into the equation for better or worse -- to please the source artist in terms of royalties as well as keep the creative talent on board for a new project, then the hypothetical startup will have experienced its first "success." It will also have been a fan project in the sense that it's taken an original property and molded it into something new, even if the property being treated wasn't something as well known as a Chrono or a Final Fantasy.

The next step would be securing a license for a more mainstream but perhaps forgotten and not-often licensed property. Say, some cyberpunk anime that appeared on TV years ago but had limited exposure and is just sitting there in an entertainment company's portfolio, doing absolutely nothing. Previous success would be an ace up the sleeve of the fangame studio and thus serve as a bargaining chip, and away you go, until you've got enough property treatments  under your belt to make a go at Square Enix's licensing and rights management department.

I wouldn't dare entertain notions of "living the dream" off such activities and making gazillions of dollars. However, I could see the hypothetical fangame studio doing a few economically useful things:

1. Generating a few extra bucks for people with professional-level coding, modeling/pixel art, and other talents who are already flipping hamburgers or otherwise seriously underemployed. They're out there, I'm sure of it. Every industry has people like this, and it's simply criminal.

2. Uniting said talent with demand that is being unsatisfied by the current videogame market.

3. Promoting market efficiency by delivering high-quality content at rock-bottom prices or comparatively rock-bottom prices.


One can dream.

[mav]

So the problem as I understand it is, the theoretical, world's first-ever American or European fangame studio needs something to cut its teeth on and prove the concept's worth, but has no opportunity to do so unless a copyright holder is incredibly, incredibly generous and open-minded. The typical corporation?...Not so much.

Couldn't have said it better myself. I mean I'm sure there are corporations willing to take a look at fan-made material, but you really have to wow them. And frankly they're probably so tired of the mindless dribble they receive on a daily basis that they overlook the quality stuff. It's kinda like trying to publishing a literary work: you can go to publisher after publisher, magazine after magazine, but in the end if you can't get them to pay a passing glance you've just wasted your time.

Securing a fan-license sounds like a tremendous challenge, regardless of the medium, especially for an "unorganized" group of fans. I guess the best bet would be attempting to put a studio together through some miraculous effort and having them submit a demo of a fan-game, in order to eventually secure a license. But that too is highly improbable. Though there are cases where these fan-games have been made into successful standalone games, with their own studios developing the game (as in, the corporation who held the IP either allowed them to or the small studio altered the material) and then releasing it. See, when I think of those scenarios, something like Chrono Ark or even Chrono Crisis come to mind--independent studios with adapted ideas hoping for some kind of legit release.

[FaustWolf]

Reflecting on the non-negligible amount of pushback the CE team and others have received during public discourse on the very concept of non-profit fan projects, I worry that there may come a day when fan projects are as heavily persecuted as P2P music sharing is today. Like, with six figure judgments against college students who engage in modding high profile games or creating fan animes. If that day arrives, only the fan license may be able to reconcile the interests of IP-holding artists with the interests of the fan culture that takes shape around their own works.

Phoenix Online Studios is the natural leader of this (hypothetical in the West) industry by default since they survived their C&D (they're the peeps behind The Silver Lining and continue with legal assurance, but a.) from what I gather they may be moving into original intellectual property for future productions and b.) the pro-bono nature of their work means no royalties to Vivendi outside of non-monetary goodwill gains, and the Silver Lining project may not make the same potentially long-lasting and precedent-setting impact in the industry as a successful fan licensing deal with royalty profits for the IP holder.

Whether the nature of multimedia fanworks going forward is to be pro-bono or profit sharing (probably would depend on the specific circumstances and nature of each specific license), securing the license before embarking on a project is becoming a must in my opinion. A license equals security, and that, at the very least, is needed for the fan talent to work comfortably.

[mav]

Whether the nature of multimedia fanworks going forward is to be pro-bono or profit sharing (probably would depend on the specific circumstances and nature of each specific license)...

I can't even imagine how benevolent a company would be to allow someone handle their IP without asking for royalties...And even if those securing the fan license have to pay hefty fees or royalties, it doesn't diminish the worth of the license itself. In fact, I'd say paying royalties to the IP holder shows a stronger level of commitment on the part of the ones securing the license.

...securing the license before embarking on a project is becoming a must in my opinion. A license equals security, and that, at the very least, is needed for the fan talent to work comfortably.

I agree wholeheartedly. The lack of a fan license in today's climate should be a big trouble for the modding community as a whole...though most modders/hackers don't care in the least, those served with C&D letters take it quite seriously. The fan license is the golden ticket: being allowed to legally work on a fan project eliminates the biggest possible obstacle any modder could potentially face. Not to mention that having a fan license makes the work completely legitimate, in the eyes of corporations; you could list your fan work as an item on a resume or portfolio! Not only would you have the joy on modding something you care deeply about, you're actually gaining real-world work experience from it!

[FaustWolf]

Just as an example of the sort of scenario I was envisioning a few posts above for a fangame studio "cutting its teeth" on a first IP and developing a reputation for quality, this is precisely the sort of initial IP I have in mind. Not the subject matter specifically (I haven't read the manga at all, just found it randomly and saw the latest news posts about how it "died"), but rather the situation surrounding the work: "amateur artist has interesting scenario concept -- and hopefully an attractive art style -- but stands very little chance of the IP making it big for (insert reason here)." Imagine how the artist's fortunes would change if a fledgling videogame studio came along out of the blue and offered him or her $10,000 ~ $20,000 for a license to make a videogame based on the original property. A five-figure sum is nothing for the likes of say, Bandai (Dragon Ball Z recently traded hands for a tidy sum of $1.75 million USD if I'm understanding news reports correctly, but maybe that's just what the IP lawyers got paid in that case), but probably an attractive nest egg for the up-and-coming manga/book/anime artist. Bonus if the creator of the IP lives in a foreign country where the US Dollar stretches much farther in terms of real purchasing power, though that does come at the cost of additional hassle navigating international copyright law.

From what I understand of US copyright law, that example of IP automatically acquires copyright by virtue of its existence (is this concept the origin of the copyright claim in the CE C&D?), though I imagine some kind of formal copyright should be registered to protect the IP in court if the author is serious about it. The basic idea I'm getting at is to negotiate a formal license with the owner of an IP -- just to say the startup fangame studio has a history of negotiating licenses, period. Obviously there's other concerns -- like crafting a license robust and specific enough to keep the copyright holder from suing you anyway, and making sure the original IP isn't too similar to other, more popular IPs already in existence. Taking a glance at this artist's web manga, I worry it's already far too close to City of Angels, Devil May Cry, and Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) just to name three IPs off the top of my head with superficial similarities.

The greatest concern for the startup fangame studio, though, is probably finding an IP electrifying enough to capture the interest of pro-quality amateur talent; while still niche enough to not already have attracted licensees for sheer lack of information. That balance between IP attractiveness and attainability would seem to be the key. Presumably, over time, the fangame studio could work its way up the reputation ladder and negotiate licenses for IPs left undeveloped by tried-and-true videogame corporations.

[tushantin]

Like fangames, dōjin soft frequently use characters from existing games, anime, or manga. These unauthorized uses of characters are generally ignored and accepted by the copyright holders, and are seen as encouraging a greater fan community. This is quite different from the West where high-profile fangames are regularly shut down by cease-and-desist orders. There are also many dōjin soft titles which are completely original, or feature only vague allusions to other series.

Apparently the eastern companies are more openminded than the western ones.

One particular circle, TYPE-MOON, has since become a commercial videogame developer and anime studio.

Ahah! So everyone's favorite anime Fate/Stay Night and Tsukihime was actually a Doujin anime! I suppose if we were to make an "anime" version of Crimson Echoes we should move to Japan. 

[FaustWolf]

It is curious that the Japanese Chrono fan community hasn't tried their hand at a major fangame. I wonder why? Or have they, and we just don't know about it?

[mav]

I wouldn't be surprised if they had made a fangame, though if they did I'm sure someone here would have stumbled upon it at one time or another...

Apparently the eastern companies are more openminded than the western ones.

Which begs the question, does SE in Japan share the same outlook on fangames that their American counterpart does? I mean, they can't both act independently when it comes to use of the company's IP...

[tushantin]

they can't both act independently when it comes to use of the company's IP...

Actually, I wonder if it's not the IP that makes them shut down major fangames but the country's copyright law itself. In fact, Japan seems to have been fine with a lotta things. Many things/franchises exported to Japan have faced issues on copyright OUTSIDE Japan. For example, Chrono BREAK was turned Chrono BRAKE.

And another famous renaming took place when Lupin III was being broadcasted in the US. At that time, LeBlanc's Arsene Lupin copyright was still there, thus the anime Lupin III was renamed as "Rupan" or "Wolf". But once the copyright expired, USA was free to broadcast it as Lupin III.

Which brings this fact: Japan is mostly okay with Doujin works, and perhaps it regarded Lupin III as a doujin "sequel" to a French writer's novel "Arsene Lupin". You have no idea how famous the anime and manga got and everyone was fine with it. But that's just not the case in the US.

Which also brings to question whether Chrono franchise's copyright will expire in a given amount of time if SE fails to make a sequel?


On another note, like I said before, Fate/Stay Night seems to have been animated by fans (TypeMoon) based on a playstation novel.   And yet it was ALLOWED to be successful. You can clearly see why there's more doujin freedom in Japan. If I were to do the same thing as TypeMoon for the Chrono series (I live in India, so I'm not sure which jurisdiction will affect me most) then perhaps the series may be popularized just as much?

[FaustWolf]

Ahhh, here we go, this is one hub that might be of interest to a theoretical startup fangame studio:
http://www.comixpress.com/

The name of the game would be to find a really awesome IP by a new independent artist, and then acquire a license from that artist to create a game based on the IP. If the game product is likewise awesome and becomes popular, then it's time to take a shot at IPs owned by more entrenched artists and second-hand property holders.

Any other well-known places like this where independent artists (be the work comic/anime; film; or even pro quality fiction writing) gather? I'd also be particularly interested in comic/anime work created by artists in Latin America, the Middle East, Russia, Africa, India, China, etc -- basically any place where the local culture would promote IPs "exotic" enough to appeal to jaded consumers used to American and Japanese cultural themes.