lawful neutral

Lawful Neutral is a column focused on law and business in the online gaming world; it’s written by Andy McAdams. [Follow this column’s RSS feed]

This looks... boring.

Lawful Neutral: Reverse engineering World of Warcraft’s subscriber numbers

17
Do you know what time it is? It's almost quarterly financial report time! We probably won't see a full quarterly report from Activision-Blizzard as...
da fuq did I just read

Lawful Neutral: Assessing the privacy policies governing World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV

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It never fails to surprise me just what some people will say in general chat in an MMO. They'll say things they would never...

Lawful Neutral: Freedom of speech in MMOs

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I don't think a day goes by without gamers ranting on Reddit or Twitter or forums or comment sections about how their freedom of...

Lawful Neutral: How might the so-called AI revolution affect the MMO genre?

56
This article has been rolling around in my head since ChatGPT rocketed into the public awareness a few months ago, and just in the...
We have Au Ra at home.

Lawful Neutral: What if Activision-Blizzard just… sold Blizzard?

35
Last week, Activision-Blizzard and Bobby Kotick got a bad surprise: The UK moved to block the acquisition of ABK by Microsoft, citing concerns over...

Lawful Neutral: What MMO gamers need to know about Section 230

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You might have seen something in the news last week about a thing called Section 230 and lots of panic over the "end of...

Lawful Neutral: Recapping 2022’s MMO and gaming law dramas

8
Fam, it's been a year. I know we've been saying that pretty much every year since 2016, but we'll stop saying it when it...
Image from Garden Warfare 2 courtesy of IronSalamander8

Lawful Neutral: How extremism and terrorism slither into online gaming

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Back in 2014, something happened in the gaming space, something whose impact was so damaging that even almost 10 years later, I realize that...

Lawful Neutral: How is an NFT MMO even supposed to work?

26
Recently, MassivelyOP hit a milestone: We received our quadrabajillionth email announcing that Scammy-scammers-now-with-NFTs-and-also-metaverse-because-reasons Inc. was a proven market leader with a new scamming game...

Lawful Neutral: Recapping the MMO industry’s legal dramas, 2021 edition

1
With meatspace commitments causing no-end of stress and herculean amounts of work for me, Lawful Neutral had a bit of a slow year that...
Technopathological.

Lawful Neutral: Managing toxicity in the MMO industry

15
When I'm playing games, I make a lot of use of the reporting function. If I see a moonkin zerg farming a spot in...

Lawful Neutral: Defining toxicity in the MMO industry

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One of my earliest memories from World of Warcraft isn't really a positive one. It was in back in the Wrath days. My guild...

Lawful Neutral: The bizarre corporate effort to buy RuneScape studio Jagex

15
Would it really be a new year without Runescape developer Jagex being involved in some sort of weird corporate sale only to be blocked...
It's a thing.

Lawful Neutral: 2020 was the year that wasn’t for MMO legal news

1
It seems surreal, but it is that time of the year again when we wax nostalgic about the year that was. Well, maybe this...
why does this continue

Lawful Neutral: The Epic vs. Apple lawsuit – when titans are tweens

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The MassivelyOP Golden Yacht was anchored someplace off the coast of Maine when the first news about Epic suing Apple hit. We had sailed...

Lawful Neutral: No really, who owns Jagex and RuneScape?

9
RuneScape is one of those games that always seems to fly under my radar. It's not intentional, and I don't have anything especially against...

Lawful Neutral: Leakers, trade secrets, and lawsuits in the online gaming world

3
In recent years, you might have noticed a new type of lawsuit coming out of game companies, as some of the more litigation-happy studios...

Lawful Neutral: Cheating, copyright law, and the WoW Glider lawsuit

4
I have fond memories of using the Game Genie on my NES. To my seven-year-old self, it was a godsend. So many Nintendo games...
We

Lawful Neutral: Examining the infamous MMO lockbox, 2020 edition

7
I have a soft spot for paranormal horror. I love movies about demons, ghosts, hauntings, possessions. There's one particular movie from the early aughts...

Lawful Neutral: Examining DDoS attacks and their impact on MMOs

8
When I was younger, used to play with LEGOs with my cousins all the time. We'd spend time creating huge houses and vehicles that...

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