[reaperman]

StarCraft 2 is still competitive 14 years later. I’m not sure I’d personally have an issue with it becoming public domain but the game is still well-stewarded today.

Even Brood War is still satisfactorily supported 26 years after its release. Though I think that’s definitely long enough to consider the option of public domain.

[piltdownman]

Brood War is still supported for 2 Reasons

#1 - It was LAN first, offline, distributed as Shareware. The forgiving netcode and leniency of distribution ended up with it as a standard install on any Internet Cafe on the planet in the early 00s. It also hit Korean culture at exactly the right moment for it to go so popular as to become a cultural touchpoint. There's a Malcolm Gladwell book in there somewhere - it literally became South Korea's unofficial national sport [1]

[1]https://www.wsj.com/video/starcraft-south-korea-unofficial-n...

#2 - It was subject to a high-profile remaster as part of Blizzard's "Classic Games division", who also did rushed and careless remasters of Diablo 3 and Warcraft 3. The post-release monetization here is quite telling, as it was basically all aimed at the Korean market - popular South Korean StarCraft casters and Children's TV hosts providing the available announcer packs, with the main cosmetic being a chibi-'cartoonised' version of the standard asset pack.

[cornholio]

The question is if that stewardship would be ruined by making it free to play the offline, single player version. More generally, would Starcraft2 and similar titles still would have been made if Blizzard knew it only had 10 years to recoup the costs?

The copyright lobby frames that question in a profoundly toxic way: are there any marginal profits that can still be milked for our IP portfolio? Of course there are, you can milk pennies even from "Steamboat Willie" and Chaplin movies, but that doesn't mean we should have perpetual copyright.

What matters is the first few years where 90% of the profits are made, that's what motivates the creator; motivating the creator enough to create and "promoting the useful arts" are the purpose of copyright, there is no "natural" right to one's ideas and creation. It's a social and political compromise for the good of all.

[piltdownman]

Would Blizzard have made Starcraft 2 at all if they had predicted the paradigm-shift towards microtransactions and cosmetics, with the 'game' itself as a loss-leader? This basically forced their hand to make the game free-to-play 7 years into the initial release cycle.

Indeed, Blizzard developer Jason Hall previously revealed that a single cosmetic skin for your horse in WoW made more money than the entirety of sales from Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.

The only reason that Starcraft2 is alive at all is the late-cycle introduction of a co-op mode, with microtransaction gated cosmetics, 'commanders', and commentator voicepacks. The online is all but dead, with almost no moderation and stewardship, and plagued by maphackers at all tiers. Even something as basic as the EU MMR brackets for tier ranking are completely broken for nearly a year.

[reaperman]

FWIW starcraft 2 is free to play, just not “offline”. And only one single player campaign is free, the other 2.5 costs money. Continuing revenue is primarily generated via cosmetic sales.

[leni536]

Is it the same StarCraft2 as 10 years ago, or regularly updated?

[reaperman]

It’s had 2 subsequent major changes with massive differences in units, game balance, and pacing … to the point of almost being three different games. The most recent and current era is called “Legacy of the Void” and is about 9 years old. Since then changes have been fairly conservative, mainly just unit stats changes. Though some “units” like infested terrans have been removed in the past nine years, which could be considered semi-major/semi-minor.

[gwd]

It gets regular balance updates. They've slowed quite a bit, but there was one in the last few months, and I believe the one before that was like 2 years or so. There's also the matchmaking, which is a service they provide.

The issue here isn't so much, "Are Blizzard allowed to charge for SC2?", but "What would happen if Blizzard pulled the plug on SC2 servers?" It would very much be a shame if a game like that were suddenly ripped out of the culture.

[dgoldstein0]

I thought they stopped updating, but I see they are still shopping patches as recently as this March. Maybe they just stopped producing new content.

[piltdownman]

The patches are for the Ranked multiplayer - the balance patches are literally to nerf dominating pro-players who found meta-breaking strategies. They're not designed to serve their core userbase and end make the game less interesting and more frustrating for anyone other than the top 64 Worldwide bracket.

The recent resurge of interest and player activity based on a wildly unbalanced and broken but fun 'Broodwar Units in SC2' mod is testament to this [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1cqw7hv/sc1_vs_s...

[TeMPOraL]

If we allow the copyright for the whole work to be extended indefinitely through subsequent updates, that kind of defeats the original idea.

[leni536]

Does it? For single player games you can just still use and distribute the original, unpatched version.

I agree that there is lock-in with online multiplayer games, but it's more on the game servers than the distributed content. So it's only marginally a copyright issue.

[reaperman]

I think the person above you meant “If the copyright clock for the original release keeps getting reset every time an update drops…” and you’re talking about “If each updated version gets its own copyright clock upon release”.

Copyright (and patent) law generally follows the latter in western nations, but there’s nuance because third-party derivative works can easily contain elements which the original IP owners might feel are “derivatives” of newer innovations from subsequent updates, even if the third-party feels they only based their work on the original release.

There’s often a lot of room for reasonable minds to disagree, and it can be difficult to create quality third-party derivatives which avoid any similarities to newer versions of the IP.

Think of creating a modern representation of Mickey Mouse. If you create a new version of Mickey Mouse based on the 1928 version in Steamboat Willy, it is difficult to make something that looks relatively contemporary without creating something that looks arguably derivative of the 1953 work “The Simple Things” or the 1940 work “Fantasia”. You could play it safe by using something that looks like a carbon copy of Steamboat Willy, but if your personal artistic vision involves a more contemporary art style, it is understandably difficult to make it unambiguously not a derivative of more recent depictions that are still under copyright.

For the Starcraft 2 example - in a thought experiment where the 14 year old “Wings of Liberty” version is now public domain but the 11-year old “Heart of the Swarm” expansion pack and current 9-year old “Legacy of the Void” version of StarCraft 2 are both still under copyright. You want to make a new single-player campaign which takes place after LotV and doesn’t retcon any canon events (many of which are still copyrighted). A careful creator would probably understand they couldn’t make any references to Amon being reborn and defeated by Artanis, because that plot is from the still-copyrighted Legacy of the Void. But would you be able to write a storyline that contains any acknowledgements that Zeratul died? (Zeratul died at the hand of his friend, Artanis, due to some of Amon’s mind-control machinations during that same LotV campaign)

I think a creator would have to be careful precisely how their storyline acknowledges Zeratuls death. If its just a few characters generically lamenting the loss of a great/controversial man…probably fine? What if the loss of their friend Zeratul was specified to have occurred “in battle” with no other specifics about the battle? I have no clue. If your storyline includes a tiny quip about Artanis dealing with unspecified guilt/shame over Zeratul’s unspecified death … then that might be technically infringing until LotV falls out of copyright, because some people may feel that it’s specific enough to be definitely derived from the LotV campaign.

Note that all three of these similar examples are where a creator does in fact intend to create a derivation of copyrighted materials to create a sequel campaign to the uncopyrighted work which is still “in-canon” with respect to still-copyrighted works. Its just exploring where is the line of “how much derivation can you morally and/or ethically and/or legally get away with before at least one reasonable person genuinely feels you have elements that are unambiguously derived from still-copyrighted content?”

For “legally” getting away with something you have to consider the costs of successfully defending yourself against lawsuits from notoriously overly-litigious corporations like Disney/Nintendo/Blizzard. Are you so safe that you could get a summary dismissal or is there any reason it could qualify for awards of punitive damages under Anti-SLAPP laws?

[leni536]

You make good arguments about derivative works on public domain works, where some other derivative works are still in copyright. That's probably difficult to maneuver legally.

However if the goal is to just distribute the original public domain work legally, then that's easy and convenient. That alone would be hugely beneficial for games.