The Retro Arcade creator, MetaGravity Studio, launched the NFT playable games last week on blockchain technology. Unfortunately, however, the crypto company had to take down the games due to copyright issues.
The company launched the NFTs to preserve the ‘abandonware games’, including Remedy’s Death Rally and Blizzard’s Blackthorne.
Despite the enthusiasm of the MetaGravity Studio to produce NFT games, the company missed out on the importance of IP rights and licenses. As a result, the company had some of its NFT games taken down after launching due to copyright issues.
NFTs work similarly to real-life events; they are often considered a real-world simulation. Unfortunately, most NFT users or creators often fail to miss this point, resulting in copyright and intellectual property infringement issues. The MetaGravity Studio also fell into a similar predicament by creating and auctioning NFTs without getting the right authorization, resulting in the collections being deleted.
A Plan to Build Future Games
The CEO of MetaGravity Studio, Rashin Mansoor, issued a statement regarding the takedown of the NFT collections. “The licence seems to check out for the purpose, but I didn’t want to get dragged into any debates as that’s not in the spirit of the collection.” Therefore, in the spirit of building a memorable NFT collection, the studio has taken down the NFT collections in a bid to make mint passes for future games.
The surprising part of the whole development is that they were not properly working as planned before the games were taken down. A team member who attempted to play the games before they were finally taken down complained about the browsers being unable to detect the games and having compatibility issues with the keyboard.
It was unclear what level of authorization the Studio got before developing the games and what terms were agreed upon under the criteria of “abandonware.”
In reaction to the news about IP issues, Mansoor noted that the Studio had made plans to ensure that only the free versions of the games were made available. The whole goal was to allow players to enjoy the NFT games while also on the side of regulatory caution.
