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IP Watch
August 6, 2009
Music Wins Gold in Video Games
By: E. Scott Johnson
The video game market presents exciting opportunities to promote music and artists to new audiences. Video game exposure can result in follow-on opportunities (e.g., a popular video game could be made into a motion picture, requiring re-licensing of the music), and allow recording artists to engage with fans in compelling new ways. Consequently, publishers, songwriters, record companies (i.e., copyright owners) and recording artists are working hard to get their music into video games.
Click to continue...No, Seriously? The Relevance of Patents in the Serious Games Industry
By: Royal W. Craig
Never has an industry evolved as fast as software has. From next to nothing in the 1970s, worldwide revenues now exceed 500 billion dollars and grow at 15% per year. Video game revenues alone exceed 20 billion dollars and grow at a staggering 30-40% rate. Price Waterhouse estimates that by 2011, the worldwide gaming market will be worth almost $50 billion.
In a relatively small sub-sector of that, things take on a somber and serious tone. In the serious game industry "learning by doing" is the mantra for a variety of scenarios ranging from medical mass trauma to shipboard navigation. Although the serious game industry pulls in a paltry few hundred million dollars per year, it remains the most vaunted. This is purely a function of potential. Corporate America has underutilized serious games for training, but this is changing. In the years since early flight simulators caught our attention, serious game developers have vastly improved the user experience. Improvements in core gaming technologies help, such as 3D simulation engines, GUIs, artificial intelligence, and multi-player networking. Whenever a relatively young industry with huge commercial potential has low barriers to entry and many existing players, there is cutthroat market competition. Those existing players look for ways to increase their market share and inevitably consider the intellectual property system as a potential competitive tool.
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