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Comment on World Of Warcraft Turtle WoW Servers Hit With Blizzard Lawsuit

hisao@ani.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I’m fan of modding, but I wouldn’t want to waste my own time doing modding in cases like this. Outside of opensource projects, modding works well for old, effectively abandonware games, running on custom sourceports. Where almost everything is allowed and corpos don’t blatantly abuse peoples free work. I do mapping for Doom and Heretic. I play Minecraft mods occasionally but I pity developers for spending their time and not getting what they deserve in return and I wouldn’t want to waste my time doing Minecraft mods myself to support Microsoft Mojang mismanaging this game so bad. Theoretically Luanti could have been the solution, but it’s just damn bad because that particular kind of top-down approach to extensibility didn’t work well. Fan art is in much better place because it’s a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.

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teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

I wouldn’t want to waste my time doing…mods myself to support [corpos]…

Fan art is in much better place because it’s a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.

Doesn’t that seem like a double standard? Mods that support “corpos” are a waste of time, but somehow fan art is mutually beneficial? But “mods” are literally “fan art”, the only difference is the word you’re using using. Fan art is limited in all the same ways Turtle WoW is and vice versa.

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- hisao@ani.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s very different, in multiple ways. Artists earn money from commissions, the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular. Algorithms on main platforms work by association. It’s as simple as this:
  
  I draw my OCs, I want to do commissions.
  
  Very few people are viewing my posts and are aware of me.
  
  What do I do to attract more people, who will in turn buy more commissions?
  
  Draw a fanart of popular character and/or a trending gimmick (your version of new Sonic x Miku meme, Miku birthday, you OC wearing Asuka cloth, you OC in Ghibli style, etc).
  
  This posts gets pushed by algorithm into the feeds of people who like certain popular character or shown interest in current gimmick/meme/trend thing.
  
  Some of those people after enjoying post go to artist’s page and view their other works.
  
  If they like what they see they might subscribe and order commissions later. And, this is not all: to my knowledge, the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I definitely see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku for example, or characters from popular animes.
  
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  - teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular
    
    Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.
    
    And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku
    
    But you recognize that is always illegal, right? The only reason it happens is because they’re too small and distributed for lawyers to go after every single one. But if one started gaining traction selling custom work featuring copyrighted IP, they should expect a lawsuit just like Turtle WoW. Mods are fan art, Turtle WoW is fan art, they just got popular enough that blizzard lawyers now care.
    
    The only difference here is that, as I said before, technically if Turtle WoW did it right they would never have to distribute any blizzard assets, and never make money from blizzard IP. They could theoretically be completely independent from blizzard and still distribute the exact same content. Meanwhile fan art is always dependent on the IP it references. So ironically, all your criticisms of about work being dependent on the corpos always applies to fan art, but only maybe apply to Turtle WoW if they messed up.
    
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    hisao@ani.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.
    
    The scale is not comparable at all. 100% of artists hugely benefit from fan arts, while maybe 0.01% of modders of popular games benefit from their mods.
    
    This is basically what I’m saying:
    
    creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this where people building/modding upon opensource gaming projects are
    
    no creator profit & no corpo profit = good <- this is where most of the modding for old/abandonware games is
    
    creator profit & corpo profit = good <- this is where most of fanart is
    
    no creator profit & corpo profit = bad <- this is where most of the modding for popular and live games like WoW and Minecraft is
    
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