RyanPierre
Member
Can anyone explain to me why Video Games seem to have this unique problem? Maybe I am just blind to it, but I never seem to see movies getting pulled from Amazon or Walmart because of some licensing issue running out. Or is that stuff just behind the scenes?
It's not completely unique to games. Licensing can be complicated. TV shows have run into problems with licensing music for broadcast, but not other future formats, which can lead to either changing the music or never releasing it on DVD/streaming at all.
I found this explanation for video game licensing terms:
http://www.bmlawgroup.com/?p=642
Term: At one time, the term of a music license for video games would be 5-7 years the expected life of the game. The license would include a renewal term associated with an additional license fee. Nowadays, the more typical term is in perpetuity (i.e. forever). Video game publishers cannot take a chance that the right to use a song (perhaps integral to the game) will expire and they will be unable to reacquire the rights. If the term is in perpetuity, make sure that the license is non-exclusive (at the very least).
So apparently it's possible to license stuff in perpetuity and for many formats, but I imagine it's more expensive and was much less common in the days before digital storefronts.
In the older days, you'd do a print run of X number of copies and then sell them to retailers. After your initial run, you could either do another run or stop. Doing print runs 5+ years into the life of a game seems like it'd be practically unheard of back then, and there'd be no real need to license music for a longer period if it essentially just upped the cost for you.
These days, every video game available in retailers also seems to make it to digital stores, so game publishers now have to be careful with licensed music if they still want to be able to sell them 5+ years down the line. It looks like many publishers are learning this lesson now, so hopefully it will be less of a problem going forward (if they're willing to pay for licenses in perpetuity). There's been some interesting approaches so far to music licensing issues as game pubs navigate through it all. Take-Two decided to patch some songs they couldn't re-license out of Steam copies of GTA:SA. Activision decided they didn't want the headache, so one year ago they chose to simply remove all Guitar Hero and DJ Hero DLC. Harmonix, on the other hand, tries to renegotiate Rock Band DLC on a quarterly basis as groups of songs reach the 5-year term, keeping as much as they can up for sale.