> Last year, The Tetris Company, Inc. and N3TWORK announced a multi-year agreement where N3TWORK will be the exclusive developer and publisher of new Tetris® games for mobile devices worldwide, excluding China. EA’s announcement that it will retire its Tetris®, Tetris® Premium and Tetris® Blitz games as of April 21 is a result of this agreement.
Kind of surprising they don't have recourse to rebrand/retool the game.
I think they worded it badly. I'll spare you the very litigious and long history Tetris has had with licensing, and talk about how EA got the license to make a mobile Tetris game.
1. Henk Rogers creates a company called Blue Lava Wireless, and his other company Blue Planet Software gives them the right to make a few Tetris games.
2. JAMDAT, a publisher of mobile games buys Blue Lava Wireless, and also acquires a 15 year exclusive license to publish mobile Tetris games.
3. EA buys JAMDAT later in the year, along with that license.
Can you guess the date JAMDAT bought BLW? April 20, 2005.
The Tetris Company is very protective of their brand, as they should be. They make a crap load of money from licensing it to publishers, and having exclusivity just ramps up that price.
3 days ago all of EA's Tetris games were delisted from App Stores, while some may have assumed the games would have remained up at least until April 21st. My theory is BPS and N3TWORK saw this as an issue, no Tetris on the App Store, and needed to answer to it, so they paid EA to delist early, and released their barebones Tetris game.
N3TWORK (who BPS has invested in) also has another upcoming Tetris title called Tetris Royale. It's already available for the New Zealand region, but playable anywhere if you're crafty.
You can't. The whole case rests on trade dress, a form of trademark. They clearly know what they are doing in court, with past episodes being on Nintendo's side in the past. Xio also had a terrible defense, and imo their expert witness falling flat. The evidence presented was also skewed imho, it drives me nuts every time I think about it.
I should note that it is possible to patent game mechanics, and there are various patents owned by them, and also other developers of Tetris games. None of these cover the core mechanics of Tetris however.
As far as I know, the general consensus is that you can't, but I've seen this case mentioned in several places as implying that maybe you can. I (not a lawyer, just to be clear) find this case a bit confusing because there are several places where the court seems to conflate mechanics with their presentation/rendering.
After reading about it again/more, I think it might be that people are reading a specific line of reasoning about merger doctrine as applying to copyrightability in general, when it's actually only addressing one part of the overall question of copyrightability and is still accepting that mechanics can't be copyrighted per se because they're functional. But this is still an impression and not something I can rigorously argue at this point, so be sure to consult your lawyer before writing a Tetris clone, I guess.
But it was only possible because EA can terminate their service anytime with a 30 days notice [1].
What if they had not added this in their TOS? Can N3TWORK force EA to break their TOS?
[1] from the article:
> But buried deep in the games’ terms of service, EA has made it clear that the company only has to give notice 30 days before terminating one of its services.
How it would have happened if that clause wasn't there: someone could sue them for breach of contract, claiming they had agreed to provide the service indefinitely. It could get litigated and a judge would decide whether they had made that promise. And they could be found to be at fault and forced to pay some damages, even though the contract was one they weren't legally entitled to fulfil because they didn't have a perpetual license to the IP. Or they could settle out of court, fearing that the judge would rule against them.
IANAL but in most jurisdictions I expect EA would not have lost the case and most likely no one would have taken the case. The TOS avoids the risk, though.
The big issue here is whether one can reasonably think that "using an app that I bought in an app store" offline requires the app developer to provide a service.
Long ago, we'd buy video games, and the multiplayer servers might eventually go offline--- but the single player modes were offline. Now, for nearly no technical or gameplay reason, we have games that require connecting home for singleplayer, in turn allowing game publishers to arbitrarily yank the rights to the game.
Massive EULA aside, what does "purchase" mean anymore, and do customers have a reasonable understanding of what transaction they're entering?
I can't believe it's taken N3TWORK over six months to produce a bare-bones replacement game. It doesn't even support multi-touch, so you can't move and rotate at the same time.
I'll admit, I honestly have no idea what it takes to develop, test and launch a top-tier game for mobiles, but we're talking about Tetris. And this particular version is as minimal as it gets.
I love Tetris, so I really hope they add some cleaner skins without the odd faux 3D effect and fix the controls before their battle royale version comes out.
Their battle royale game is already available in the NZ region. The version that was just released is just a stripped down version of Tetris Royale to fill the void EA's game made. The controls absolutely need to be fixed, but in the end, I just thing touch controls are bad in general, even the EA app was not enjoyable to me.
Hey, we just pulled the rug from under you but please come buy a new game, after all we "continuously aims to bring fans game experiences that are fresh, innovative and fun"
This has happened before with other IOS games (Monkey Island comes to mind) and is the main reason I never buy anything from the App Store. A number of titles never got updates for 64bit either (lost treasures of infocom) or when they did asked you to pay again (GoodReader 3) so I said fuck you to that whole ecosystem a long time ago.
I use my iOS devices to read books I side-load (libgen and Calibre), read comics and listen to music I download from private trackers and to browse the web.
I find it's helpful to treat app store purchases as a convenient way to temporarily get access to something. I don't mind paying a few bucks here and there for a game - you just have to assume you're renting it.
Some apps died from compatibility issues even before Apple killed 32-bit. Back before the iBooks store, some publishers made one app per book, and I bought Windows Internals that way.
A little while ago, before the end of 32-bit, I wanted to read it again. But the app was barely functional, it didn't accept certain touch inputs.
I get why they would do this if they have online services that they're shutting down, but it seems like the games ought to easily have offline modes (from the screenshots for Tetris Premium, I don't see any obvious online features). Even if they're losing the license, it doesn't seem like they should have to force the app to check in with a server, or push an update to kill the games, especially if the user paid for it.
From one user review:
> Hadn’t played for quite a while, so was surprised when they announced that after April 2020 the game wouldn’t be "available to play". Turns out they wrecked it a while back by making it so you can’t play offline (why? - for years it worked fine offline).
I'm surprised this is possible. I was expecting as soon as an app is installed on a device (android, iOS, etc.) No-one can tamper with it (except via update). I guess that means Apple could, if they wanted, delete apps from people's devices!
The problem is that it’s not just Tetris, but probably backed by a service which provides various in game features. Since they won’t be able to sell the game or collect in app purchase revenue, they’ve likely decided to shut down the servers.
Apps may be able to delete apps remotely (I believe their mobile device management tools allow companies to push policies like that[0]), but to my knowledge has never done so. Amazon has pulled books back from people’s Kindles and many platforms have removed content from being redownloadable.
This same thing also happened with tetrisfriends.com.
It sucks because they took all of the game modes that you could play for free and then are willing to sell them back to you in Tetris 99.
Also I don't really follow any Tetris forums or anything so I don't know how people reacted when it shut down but I was amazed it shut down since they sold mtx skins and I assume that they didn't transfer any of it to Tetris 99.
Tetris Friends shut down because the company that runs it (Tetris Online, Inc.) shut down. They had a fairly big library of games that was delisted from various platforms.
Why is Apple taking 30% if not to prevent app developers from remotely disabling offline software that has already been purchased? How is that not a malware update?
If you're in Australia you can get the ACCC to step in and force them to refund or face massive fines. Valve got their asses handed to them not that long ago for something similar.
Products must be of acceptable quality, that is:
- safe, lasting, with no faults.
- do all the things someone would normally expect them to do.
I tried to find an iOS habit tracker the other day, but eventually failed because I can’t tell what the actual cost will be, it’s all In-App-Purchase at this point.
Now add that you can’t even be sure that apps you “purchased” will continue to be available.
The app store model is broken, there’s also zero chance that I will buy anything from any app store anymore. I’ll download free apps that solves a problem, like buying a bus ticket, but that’s about it.
Apple does give a crap about the quality of their app store, as long as there’s no porn and you both directly steal, they simply do not care.
I think a big problem is that Apple puts all the maintenance effort on developers. On iOS, developers have to update apps at least once a year to make sure they keep working.
On the Mac, as on Windows, you could just keep using an old app for years. It didn't matter if the developer bothered to update their app for the latest OS, you could generally just keep using apps that you bought years ago.
In August 2008, Apple Inc. removed Tris, a version of Tetris from its online App Store. The software author had written a tetromino game for the iPhone iOS without authorization from The Tetris Company.[12] In March 2009, The Tetris Company sued BioSocia, operator of the Omgpop gaming portal[13][14] because one of its multiplayer games, Blockles, was too similar to Tetris. By September 2009, Omgpop removed the game from the website and replaced it with an alternate that the developers created, based on Puyo Puyo.
In May 2010, lawyers representing The Tetris Company sent Google a Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violation Notice regarding Tetris clones available for Android.[15] Google responded by removing the 35 games listed in the notice as it was legally obliged to do, even though, according to one developer, the games contained no references to Tetris.[16][17][18]
In February 2011, The Tetris Company continued to make copyright claims against independently developed Tetris clones, most notably against Tetrada on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The developer, Mario Karagiannis, rejected the claims of copyright infringement on the grounds that copyright does not cover gameplay design, but still removed the game, citing lack of resources to fight what he called "bullying".[19][20]
A US District Court judge ruled in June 2012, that the Tetris clone Mino from Xio Interactive infringed on the Tetris Company's copyrights by replicating elements such as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks.[21]
Why is this still going on in 2020? Is the copyright on a falling blocks game concept never going to expire? This is a poster child case for why current copyright law is harmful to everyone.
Under mickey mouse act, there's no reason to believe it will ever expire.
Whole thing is rotten to the core. Megarich proponents arguing that copyright in its current form encourages competition is about as laughable as megarich proponents arguing for trickle down economics.
I don't think copyright will be extended again because of successful SOPA protests. Disney knows they cannot really succeed now at extending copyright, so they don't bother to.
They are protecting their brand, and are trying hard to create a strong trademarkable portfolio. Copyright expires, yes, but none of the case as I understand it really brought copyright infringement into question. Instead it was about trade dress and trademark. Those don't expire. Xio created all their own assets and material, and only reused ideas to make a game. People reuse ideas to make games all the time.
They're a smart business, and very tactical. I think when they do decide to drop the hammer on someone it's because they know they can win.
They also don't do it if they don't need to. If you beat them in a search engine ranking, you better believe they'll come knocking.
How does "infringed on the Tetris Company's copyrights by replicating elements such as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks" fall under protecting the brand?
The brand, the IP, is the whole company. Once a court rules that people can recreate the rules of Tetris and make money, then they will have to compete against generic brands, and probably lose millions of annual revenue.
The thing is that they don't have copyrights on playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks, since those are actually functional elements of the game. However, they have been able to protect their brand by claiming that these things fall under trade dress.
What they've argued in court is like Ford saying that Chevy infringed on their trade dress by also using wheels, an engine, a steering wheel, etc.
> Last year, The Tetris Company, Inc. and N3TWORK announced a multi-year agreement where N3TWORK will be the exclusive developer and publisher of new Tetris® games for mobile devices worldwide, excluding China. EA’s announcement that it will retire its Tetris®, Tetris® Premium and Tetris® Blitz games as of April 21 is a result of this agreement.
Kind of surprising they don't have recourse to rebrand/retool the game.
1. Henk Rogers creates a company called Blue Lava Wireless, and his other company Blue Planet Software gives them the right to make a few Tetris games. 2. JAMDAT, a publisher of mobile games buys Blue Lava Wireless, and also acquires a 15 year exclusive license to publish mobile Tetris games. 3. EA buys JAMDAT later in the year, along with that license.
Can you guess the date JAMDAT bought BLW? April 20, 2005.
The Tetris Company is very protective of their brand, as they should be. They make a crap load of money from licensing it to publishers, and having exclusivity just ramps up that price.
3 days ago all of EA's Tetris games were delisted from App Stores, while some may have assumed the games would have remained up at least until April 21st. My theory is BPS and N3TWORK saw this as an issue, no Tetris on the App Store, and needed to answer to it, so they paid EA to delist early, and released their barebones Tetris game.
N3TWORK (who BPS has invested in) also has another upcoming Tetris title called Tetris Royale. It's already available for the New Zealand region, but playable anywhere if you're crafty.
[1] https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2012/06/tetris...
I should note that it is possible to patent game mechanics, and there are various patents owned by them, and also other developers of Tetris games. None of these cover the core mechanics of Tetris however.
After reading about it again/more, I think it might be that people are reading a specific line of reasoning about merger doctrine as applying to copyrightability in general, when it's actually only addressing one part of the overall question of copyrightability and is still accepting that mechanics can't be copyrighted per se because they're functional. But this is still an impression and not something I can rigorously argue at this point, so be sure to consult your lawyer before writing a Tetris clone, I guess.
What if they had not added this in their TOS? Can N3TWORK force EA to break their TOS?
[1] from the article:
> But buried deep in the games’ terms of service, EA has made it clear that the company only has to give notice 30 days before terminating one of its services.
IANAL but in most jurisdictions I expect EA would not have lost the case and most likely no one would have taken the case. The TOS avoids the risk, though.
Long ago, we'd buy video games, and the multiplayer servers might eventually go offline--- but the single player modes were offline. Now, for nearly no technical or gameplay reason, we have games that require connecting home for singleplayer, in turn allowing game publishers to arbitrarily yank the rights to the game.
Massive EULA aside, what does "purchase" mean anymore, and do customers have a reasonable understanding of what transaction they're entering?
I'll admit, I honestly have no idea what it takes to develop, test and launch a top-tier game for mobiles, but we're talking about Tetris. And this particular version is as minimal as it gets.
I love Tetris, so I really hope they add some cleaner skins without the odd faux 3D effect and fix the controls before their battle royale version comes out.
Eschew the clones, your pay supports the game, they said.
Thanks but no thanks
One of these days, they'll realize that isn't always a good thing.
The people who paid for the game on the App Store won't end up with what they paid for.
That's what you got.
Hope that's clearer.
I use my iOS devices to read books I side-load (libgen and Calibre), read comics and listen to music I download from private trackers and to browse the web.
A little while ago, before the end of 32-bit, I wanted to read it again. But the app was barely functional, it didn't accept certain touch inputs.
From one user review:
> Hadn’t played for quite a while, so was surprised when they announced that after April 2020 the game wouldn’t be "available to play". Turns out they wrecked it a while back by making it so you can’t play offline (why? - for years it worked fine offline).
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/tetris-classic-1j3
Apps may be able to delete apps remotely (I believe their mobile device management tools allow companies to push policies like that[0]), but to my knowledge has never done so. Amazon has pulled books back from people’s Kindles and many platforms have removed content from being redownloadable.
0 - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicemanagement/r...
Also I don't really follow any Tetris forums or anything so I don't know how people reacted when it shut down but I was amazed it shut down since they sold mtx skins and I assume that they didn't transfer any of it to Tetris 99.
One app that I bought on the app store for 60€ just refused to start one day if I didn't buy an additional annual subscription.
When I complained to Apple, they just told me to contact the developer.
They take 30%, but they don't care one bit if what they sold you actually works.
Products must be of acceptable quality, that is:
- safe, lasting, with no faults.
- do all the things someone would normally expect them to do.
Now add that you can’t even be sure that apps you “purchased” will continue to be available.
The app store model is broken, there’s also zero chance that I will buy anything from any app store anymore. I’ll download free apps that solves a problem, like buying a bus ticket, but that’s about it.
Apple does give a crap about the quality of their app store, as long as there’s no porn and you both directly steal, they simply do not care.
On the Mac, as on Windows, you could just keep using an old app for years. It didn't matter if the developer bothered to update their app for the latest OS, you could generally just keep using apps that you bought years ago.
In May 2010, lawyers representing The Tetris Company sent Google a Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violation Notice regarding Tetris clones available for Android.[15] Google responded by removing the 35 games listed in the notice as it was legally obliged to do, even though, according to one developer, the games contained no references to Tetris.[16][17][18]
In February 2011, The Tetris Company continued to make copyright claims against independently developed Tetris clones, most notably against Tetrada on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The developer, Mario Karagiannis, rejected the claims of copyright infringement on the grounds that copyright does not cover gameplay design, but still removed the game, citing lack of resources to fight what he called "bullying".[19][20]
A US District Court judge ruled in June 2012, that the Tetris clone Mino from Xio Interactive infringed on the Tetris Company's copyrights by replicating elements such as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks.[21]
Why is this still going on in 2020? Is the copyright on a falling blocks game concept never going to expire? This is a poster child case for why current copyright law is harmful to everyone.
DMCA is a bad copyright-related law, but it's not the core of copyright law
Whole thing is rotten to the core. Megarich proponents arguing that copyright in its current form encourages competition is about as laughable as megarich proponents arguing for trickle down economics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-i...
The game rules? No.
They're a smart business, and very tactical. I think when they do decide to drop the hammer on someone it's because they know they can win.
They also don't do it if they don't need to. If you beat them in a search engine ranking, you better believe they'll come knocking.
The thing is that they don't have copyrights on playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks, since those are actually functional elements of the game. However, they have been able to protect their brand by claiming that these things fall under trade dress.
What they've argued in court is like Ford saying that Chevy infringed on their trade dress by also using wheels, an engine, a steering wheel, etc.