Legality?!

[xander76]

Has there been any indication that publishers of a lot of the mod games being created are going to step in a try to take TTS down?

Only thing that put me off picking it up in the sales.

[Tiberia]

Hmm I guess I will report this Topic to Steam Support itself if no Developer is going to answer to that question because litterally atm most of the mods are Illegal (There are a lot of DRM free Copys of games as well as games witch got an legal allow letter from the developer.)

Well if no developer from the Game itself says something to this I might as well ask the Steam Copyright infrigment departmend what they think of it. ^^

[bwc153]

If you think posting in a steam thread is talking to the developers, you're going to have a bad time... Search out the means to contact them directly, they probably have an email sitting around somewhere to contact them by.

[Tiberia]

bwc153님이 먼저 게시:

If you think posting in a steam thread is talking to the developers, you're going to have a bad time... Search out the means to contact them directly, they probably have an email sitting around somewhere to contact them by.

That is what I meant. Reporting this threat to Steam Copyright support. I know that they have a Email. A good friend of mine has a Famely Member who works there actually. So I will just send this stuff to him and Ask him for the Opinnion of his Family Member That is at least faster than writting a support mail to the section :)

[Highly Inappropriate]

RedScaledOne님이 먼저 게시:

That is what I meant. Reporting this threat to Steam Copyright support. I know that they have a Email. A good friend of mine has a Famely Member who works there actually. So I will just send this stuff to him and Ask him for the Opinnion of his Family Member :illuminati: That is at least faster than writting a support mail to the section :)

At first I didn't bother to reply to this, as I figured you *intentionally* want to screw this up, but let me just clearify for you what your options are:

- You can contact Berserk Games (that made Tabletop Simulator) about this, at [e-mail]. The effect would be that they review if there are any illegal games in the workshop, and either remove those, or try to make a deal with game publishers to make them legal either as free or paid for DLC.

- You can contact publishers like for instance Games Workshop (that owns Heroquest) about this, at [e-mail]. The effect could in the worst case scenario be that they contact Beserk Games about this, with lawyers, and Berserk Games would have to calm them down, but failing that, Heroquest would be pulled, and Berserk Games could be liable for damages.

- If you're Cthulhu, you could also try to contact Steam Copyright support about this, which more than likely would result in them going "Oh." and then pulling Tabletop Simulator from Steam altogether, along with all its mods, most likely forever, if they discover any copyright infringement.

If you're actually not hellbent on the destruction of Tabletop Simulator, you pick option A, but it's your choice.

[Slime Drips]

Andreasen님이 먼저 게시:

First of all: There are off-steam mods?

Second of all, it's quite possible that publishers could either grant TS rights for anchient games, or *sell* their games as DLC for TS.

1) Yes. If a game has workshop support it has regular mod support too, even if it doesn't advertise it. In fact, tons of games WITHOUT workshop support are also easily moddable. This is mostly true for games where textures or other files are left out in the open, allowing you to reskin the game to your will, but is also true in cases where people have figured out how to decompile bits of the game (Dark Souls, Deadly Premonition, Spelunky).

2) Not actually a bad idea, but not very likely until TTS is out of beta and/or is just polished up a lot more. No one wants their work officially supported by something so... grubby.

Andreasen님이 먼저 게시:

Also, Mallow:
There's also a few games where the publisher is clearly at fault for exploiting copyright.
I'm talking about Magic: The Gathering, and also games like that, where a Black Lotus paper card is right now on sale at ebay for $100 000. That's piracy having the moral highground right there.

That statement doesn't really hold any significance. There is no "moral high ground" when you're pirating 500 other cards that you could get at low costs in addition to the ridiculously expensive one. Additionally, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Online version of MTG (not duels of the planeswalkers, it's on their site) might be able to give players unlimited versions of cards, even ones that are considered to be hard to get IRL.

Andreasen님이 먼저 게시:

...but with digital gaming platforms, nobody has bought any cards, so if you have the limitless ability to use cards, you remove the money value aspect from the picture, so people can actually focus on actually playing instead.

I'm going to guess this is besides your point, but that's not really true either. See online-centric TCGs like Infinity Wars.

pbb76님이 먼저 게시:

Ha! Ha! I love the internet :) where did I say that I wanted to pirate games?

pbb76님이 먼저 게시:

My point is, if I pay for TTS which is basically an engine for other people to add modded, mostly licensed versions of existing board games

Right there, actually. Well, basically, you haven't specifically said you wanted to, but are implying it in ways that make you look like you're trying to dance around saying "yes I just want to download illegal copies of MTG".
And I hope know that "pirating games" includes digital representations of physical things, right? I mean in the case of card games, especially with TTS, the digital version is nearly identical to the physical version.

Same goes with the unofficial MTG and YGO simulators you can find. Those are technically piracy.

pbb76님이 먼저 게시:

And (I believe) none of the mods for TTS are 'legal' anyways so what moral high ground are you taking exactly?

Yes, sure, the 3d models I've downloaded that people created themselves are illegal, yes.
And truly any homebrew card game someone makes and ports to TTS is also illegal. You make a lot of sense.

Basically, everything you say is moot because you do not grasp what the game can actually be used for. If there's mods that port an old, defunct game into TTS and the original developers don't care, or can't do anything about it because they no longer own the rights then that's grand, but that's not the point. TTS is intended as a game building engine so that homebrew developers can actually test things out without printing out dozens of cards on ♥♥♥♥♥♥ paper and wasting tons of ink.

Furthermore, like I said there's off-steam mods. If it means so much to you to have the illegal representation of TCGs that their developers don't want in TTS then I'm sure you can find a version of the mod somewhere else. Hell, decks are just large image files anyway, I'm sure there's a bunch of MTG etc decks floating around imgur even.

[Slime Drips]

Dear Steam: Please add a "view post preview" button so I don't make a cascade of quotes by accident, that was annoying to fix.

[Slime Drips]

Oh, there was a second page of comments, ok.

bwc153님이 먼저 게시:

If you think posting in a steam thread is talking to the developers, you're going to have a bad time...

Not necessarily, lot's of indie devs check out Steam forums to keep in contact with their fans and receive any quality or bug reports that might be mentioned. Games that have had their devs pay attention to the Steam forums I know of include: Infinity Wars, Anodyne, Momodora, and Bunny Must Die.

Andreasen님이 먼저 게시:

- If you're Cthulhu, you could also try to contact Steam Copyright support about this, which more than likely would result in them going "Oh." and then pulling Tabletop Simulator from Steam altogether, along with all its mods, most likely forever, if they discover any copyright infringement.

Little one, might I explain to you some things about copyright? TTS is in literally no danger from any of this. Developers are not held responsible for things that modders or users do, I'm pretty sure this is even in the Workshop and Steam TOS agreements.

Furthermore you act like things haven't been taken down on the workshop already. Like I said way earlier there's a lot of games missing from the workshop that one would assume someone would port into TTS. I wouldn't believe you if you tried to tell me no one's made an MTG port yet, in fact it would probably be the number 1 mod if it was up there, so my only guess is it was taken down at the request of Wizards of the Coast or that someone else reported it to save Wizards the hassle.


Basically just don't worry, and I'm pretty sure each workshop item has a report function, so if you're so inclined to bring Valve into this (and they really won't respond to you most of the time, they're kind of neglectful in that right) then hit the button on items that you think shouldn't be allowed to be shared via TTS and call it a day.

[Roninlord]

In short, I skipped the whole discussion but here's the answer
Some mods like munchkin already've been taken off, TTS is still around tho

[._.Stashed Girl._.]

Munchkin is not down.
It's still alive again on the Steam Workshop.

EDIT (adding a link): http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse?searchtext=Munchkin&childpublishedfileid=0&section=items&appid=286160

[Roninlord]

Aтαηα¢ιυѕ님이 먼저 게시:

Munchkin is not down.
It's still alive again on the Steam Workshop.

EDIT (adding a link): http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse?searchtext=Munchkin&childpublishedfileid=0&section=items&appid=286160

I'm talking about previous collection of munchkin that was by another author, it was legally taken down

[._.Stashed Girl._.]

Ok, In the future I think the Steam Workshop feature will be "moderated" by "approval measures"...

Legality is a great huge problem that Tabletop simulator developpers will must carefully follow...

[Highly Inappropriate]

Aтαηα¢ιυѕ님이 먼저 게시:

Legality is a great huge problem that Tabletop simulator developpers will must carefully follow...

While I'd love to see Advanced Heroquest on TTS, so that I can finally get rid of it IRL (because the box with all the pieces in is huge), I'm seeing a lack of originality. Yes, you can scan in images for cards, but you can also make your own cards, making something new. Are they making these just to make a mod that gets attention? Seems pointless from a creativity standpoint.

[._.Stashed Girl._.]

I already have an idea of a Card Game (including COOP and 1 player version) !

Where i'm ONLY THE AUTHOR

But, it take a little time to be creative !

Once finished I publish it to the Workshop!

[SquigglyJ]

Well I've seen a quite a couple of games taken down. Any game published by Games workshop is aggresively pursued, they even went on BGG and made people take off thier own add ons (like a 2 person version of chainsaw warrior). I doubt TTS will go down, because they aren't making the custom content, the users are. Each game in the workshop is dealt with in a case by case basis and I have a feeling it will stay that way.

I feel most trademark/copyright holders don't know (or care) about it though. More likely don't know. It's only a couple hundread people subscribing to these mods at most and I don't know about the next person but I don't play everything I subscribe to.

[Tiberia]

Andreasen님이 먼저 게시:

RedScaledOne님이 먼저 게시:

That is what I meant. Reporting this threat to Steam Copyright support. I know that they have a Email. A good friend of mine has a Famely Member who works there actually. So I will just send this stuff to him and Ask him for the Opinnion of his Family Member That is at least faster than writting a support mail to the section :)

At first I didn't bother to reply to this, as I figured you *intentionally* want to screw this up, but let me just clearify for you what your options are:

- You can contact Berserk Games (that made Tabletop Simulator) about this, at [e-mail]. The effect would be that they review if there are any illegal games in the workshop, and either remove those, or try to make a deal with game publishers to make them legal either as free or paid for DLC.

- You can contact publishers like for instance Games Workshop (that owns Heroquest) about this, at [e-mail]. The effect could in the worst case scenario be that they contact Beserk Games about this, with lawyers, and Berserk Games would have to calm them down, but failing that, Heroquest would be pulled, and Berserk Games could be liable for damages.

- If you're Cthulhu, you could also try to contact Steam Copyright support about this, which more than likely would result in them going "Oh." and then pulling Tabletop Simulator from Steam altogether, along with all its mods, most likely forever, if they discover any copyright infringement.

If you're actually not hellbent on the destruction of Tabletop Simulator, you pick option A, but it's your choice.

Sorry was on vacation and got a good message.
Hm I have no Oficcialy statemant and my english is still bad but He told me the following.
Quota from friend:

"
TTS creates no Copywright infrigments that he can see, the games they have already pre installed are modified and most of them are so to say free for use.
The Workshop contend as a change is a problem but they already looked into it and as long as noone claims Copyright infrigments they don't need to take action"

so even though teh text suffered from poor german to english out of the mind translation i guess it says a lot about what steam thinks.