Epic Games Ends Another Lawsuit With Permanent Injunction


Back in January, MMO Fallout reported on the latest lawsuit filed by Epic Games in the district of Northern California court. The lawsuit followed the similar pattern set forth by its predecessors, seeking permanent injunctions and utilizing the natural legal progression of a DMCA takedown notice against the defendant’s Youtube videos. This lawsuit, however, charged defendant Yash Gosai, a New Zealand resident, with creating/finding an exploit that would allow him to obtain V-Bucks, Fortnite’s real money currency, without paying for them. Gosai posted the exploit on his Youtube channel and, when the video was taken down on Epic’s DMCA notice, filed a counter-claim.

Epic alleges that Gosai created, developed and/or found an exploit for Fortnite’s Battle Royale game mode; Gosai then created and publicly displayed a video on YouTube to advertise, demonstrate, and distribute the exploit; Gosai’s video contained gameplay from Epic’s Fortnite Battle Royale game; and that using the exploit, Gosai obtained Fortnite V-bucks without paying for them.

Less than a month later, the lawsuit is over with Epic Games claiming the victory. The court found in favor of Epic Games on the charges of copyright infringement, breach of contract, and conversion. The court’s decision, which cannot be appealed by either party, permanently restrains Gosai from finding, creating, promoting, sharing, or otherwise interacting with any program/cheat that interacts with any of Epic Games’ titles. As with its other lawsuits, Epic Games is not seeking monetary damages and as per the court’s ruling both sides will be responsible for their own attorney’s fees.

Since October 10, 2017, Epic Games has filed seven lawsuits against people creating/promoting cheats for Fortnite, of which four have been successfully settled. For two of the three remaining lawsuits, Epic appears to be having trouble serving the summons. In the third, filed against a Russian citizen, is allegedly being ignored.

(Source: PACER Court Documents)

NCSoft Reports Growth For Fourth Quarter 2017


NCSoft today released their fourth quarter results for 2017 and the company has posted increased earnings across the board over last year. Sales, profits, and income grew over 80% over the same period in 2016 fueled primarily by the company’s massive success in the mobile market and the launch of the latest expansion for Guild Wars 2. Mobile sales dropped 41% over the last quarter as the launch fervor of Lineage M dies down, while Guild Wars 2 gained a 73% growth over the same period.

For the year of 2017, mobile sales accounted for 57% of total earnings while Lineage 1 dropped 59% with much of that revenue being players transferring to Lineage M. Revenues from Korea and royalties grew massively while the market share from US/Europe, Japan, and Taiwan decreased slightly. Fourth quarter earnings from the US/Europe did grow despite the overall yearly drop due to sales of Guild Wars 2 and its expansion.

(Source: NCSoft)

Crowdfunding Fraudsters: Marvel Heroes and the Diploma Mill of Nostalgia


Fraudster:
2a:  a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor;

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I actually get a lot of criticism when it comes to Crowdfunding Fraudsters for apparently being too lenient on the subjects. I take a lot of time to carefully parse my statements so that we’re not making any assumptions on motivation or things that can’t be proven outright, and quite a few people take that as me trying to play devil’s advocate for what they see as an obviously shady campaign. I understand where they’re coming form, and on behalf of protecting my own legal liabilities, I humbly disagree.

Now this campaign, on the other hand, nobody’s getting sunburn with all of the shadiness present.

I introduce you to the Marvel Heroes Rebirth, an Indiegogo campaign seeking $450,000 on a promise that it can’t keep for the sale of a property that they haven’t secured the rights for. It may look like your run of the mill predatory “jump on the nostalgia” sort of campaign that we’ve seen to revive old games or port them onto new systems either without the intention of or without the attempt to secure the rights from those who hold them, but if you shovel away the first layer we come upon a whole world of oddities. But more on that later.

I’ll start with the opening statement which reads like it was written by a timeshare salesman.

A sinister villain has shut down an iconic game. Fans are outraged. There is no relief in sight. Where is the hero destined to save the day and ease their suffering??? Oh, it’s you! We have an opportunity to save a great game that would otherwise be destined for the great void. There will be challenges and risks, but a great reward for those brave enough to help save the Marvel Heroes game platform. Help us save this game making it something better, stronger and faster than before.

The developer forming up to save Marvel Heroes is called Eldermage Studios, and if you head to their website it looks pretty independent gamey, very much focused around the proposition to rebirth Marvel Heroes anew. Do they have any credentials? No, but they’re hiring or they would be I suppose if the “Join Us” led to a working link. A company like this has to have some sort of founder, big industry guy, some sort of Richard Garriot-type philanthropist who really likes Marvel. I’ll even take a nerd with no programming skills but a lot of love for nostalgia who really liked Everquest back in the day.

Now $450 grand may seem like peanuts compared to the kind of money you would expect to need to license and host Marvel Heroes, and this campaign has heard your concerns and wants you to know that there is nothing to worry about since this pitch will very likely fail miserably.

  • Unless millions are raised to fund this campaign, the odds of this option being successful are very limited.

There’s the insurance statement. But it’s not all gloom and doom because the Copyright Office is reviewing a proposal that may exempt abandoned MMOs from the DMCA protection, which would allow Eldermage to legally operate the game even without Disney’s approval.

  • If Disney is unwilling to partner with us, there still may be another path.  Through March, 2018, the US Copyright Office is reviewing a proposal that would exempt abandoned MMOs from Digital Millennium Copyright Act protection; if exempted this would allow organizations such as ours to continue hosting Marvel Heroes. However, there is the likelihood that the game could not be further developed.   For more info and to provide your feedback on “Proposed Class 8” exemptions, visit the US Copyright Office.

In which case the pledges would be useless as you either wouldn’t be legally allowed to make those alterations into the game code or it would still be illegal for you to profit off of operating Marvel Heroes. Alternately, they might strip out all of the Marvel characters and replace them with public domain heroes which wouldn’t actually be that bad of an idea. Frankly I’d love to see a Diablo-style game using mostly golden-age heroes and it’d be a great way to bring them back to the public eye. You might have something going here.

And Eldermage does explain what the money is going towards:

To achieve our plan, we are currently seeking a minimum of $450k – $900k to acquire the intellectual property, cover due diligence and legal fees, procure necessary third-party support to host the rebranded game, and restore the game to use.  Yes, this is a large expense but much less than the original tens of millions of dollars used to develop and operate the platform.

A smart business decision that worked out great for Gamersfirst with All Points Bulletin, a $100 million engine that was sold for pennies on the dollar when Realtime Worlds went bankrupt and became profitable under the new company.

Now I could talk all day about the empty promises and nostalgia baiting that accompany these campaigns all day, but I wanna know: Who is the face behind Elder Mage? Unfortunately there is no staff page and the Elder Mage domain was registered by a name hiding company in Scottsdale Arizona. Sorry, I guess that’s the end of our trip! All we really have to go on is this bit about a 501c(3) organization called Paragon Institute.

Paragon Institute is a 501(c)(3) educational, non-profit; our goal is to establish ElderMage Studios as a learning lab to partner experienced professionals with aspiring game developers to help them gain the skills and hands-on experience necessary to work in the field. This may include time spent supporting or enhancing existing titles to create entirely new ones. A secondary mission is to preserve games that are no longer supported so that those who have licensed them may continue using them and so others may learn from them.

When you go to Paragon Institute’s website, you get a landing page for Paragon Academy which appears to be ticking down to something in 386 days, it looks like the academy is relaunching or something. What really interested me was that this Institute has a physical location in Cary, North Carolina and frankly physical location is basically like filling your legitimacy pitcher halfway from the get go. So I decided to just give the address a perusal in Google Maps to see the grandeur of this institute.

It’s a cul-de-sac, and I’m 99% certain that Google didn’t mess up the address, and I’m not all that worried about privacy because it is literally on the contact page for the Institute’s website.

So I continued to check out the website to see its legitimacy because if the Institute is indeed hosted out of some dude’s house, then the rolling photos on the website depicting smiling young people in classroom settings are total nonsense. In fact, I’m not in the greatest of moods and there are only three images rotating on the website, so let’s check those out: I did a quick backtracing on the Googles and it looks like this, this, and this, were creatively lifted and slightly modified from here, here, and here.

So maybe I’m being unnecessarily paranoid. Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t find anything, despite being a seasoned master of Google-fu, and this institute looks like a diploma mill. There isn’t enough information, let’s keep searching. There are three links on the “Students, Faculty, and Staff” page. The student/staff portal leads to the Office homepage, the Portal registration leads to an Office account creation page, and the page for former Chadwick students leads to a non-existent website.

And what is Chadwick University? It’s a diploma mill founded by one Lloyd Clayton Jr., whose credentials need no further introduction than his degree in holistic massage (this is a joke, he doesn’t actually claim to have such a degree). Chadwick University was not accredited and is considered an illegal supplier of degrees in the state of Texas (among others), it offered degrees based on “life experience” and basically just shut down in 2007 with Clayton no longer answering the phone. Chadwick U was accredited by the non-recognized World Association of Universities and Colleges, whose founder Maxine Asher genuinely believed to have discovered the lost city of Atlantis thanks in part to her psychic abilities, however her research was allegedly suppressed by the “Jews and Catholics.” Asher ran her own diploma mill fraud racket and sadly passed away in 2016.

But here you have Paragon Institute, a magical academy run from a cul-de-sac somehow linked to a defunct diploma mill accredited by a defunct diploma mill founded by a psychic who discovered Atlantis, and this is the company that wants to revive Marvel Heroes if only the public will give them lots and lots of money.

Buzzfile lists Paragon’s website as virtucorp, a website that no longer exists but through the power of Web Archive appears to have been filled with lorem ipsum gibberish.

Paragon Inc’s founder and only known employee Willis Adkins is currently running for a Congress seat in North Carolina’s 2nd District. According to its 501c(3) filings, Paragon Institute Inc used to go under the name “American Southern University Inc” and for years did business under names like “SGUS Academy,” “American Institute of Independent Studies,” “ASU Press,” “Miskatonic Institute,” and “American Center for Professional Studies.” MMO Fallout could not procure any web presence, addresses, or information for any of these names. Paragon Institute has filed a 990-N each year, a card for organizations whose claimed gross receipts are less than $50 thousand. As such, we were unable to procure standard public tax records which might include more information about the organization.

But the Marvel Heroes revival has a flexible goal of $450,000 meaning that even if nobody else contributes, they’ll still be able to keep that $305 in dosh that six backers put in.

 

 

Crowdfunding Update: Greed Monger Delivering Refunds To Backers


Greed Monger is a bit of a touchy subject here at MMO Fallout, considering it’s one of the few games that we outright refused to publicize should it ever reappear on Kickstarter, but we have some positive news on the game and its creator Jason Appleton. While Appleton may not have had much success creating video games, as evidenced by the crowdfunding and subsequent fall of Greed Monger, the man does appear to have more of a conscious than your average failed Kickstarter project and a willingness to right past wrongs.

That, and an impressive portfolio of cryptocurrency, because Appleton has taken a step extraordinary for Kickstarter creators and has begun extending refunds out of pocket. Backers have received updates over the past week or so letting them know that they can submit refund requests that will be processed through Paypal (or Bitcoin if that’s your preference). The refunds have started flowing, with Appleton noting that he is limited to $2,000 per day via Paypal restrictions on transfers.

Thank you guys for being patient. Its not easy coming up with 6 figures to repay donations to a passion project. But we are going to get there.

Backers interested in receiving refunds should check out the link below. Appleton took the time to post on Massively’s coverage that this controversy had been weighing on his mind for years and that in retrospect he understands the skepticism of the original campaign.

“As for the Refunds, yes, this has been a plague on my mind for many years and finally being in a position to make it all right has been a huge load off. I truly believed this project could be done. I thought everyone telling me I was crazy for even thinking it to be possible just jealous for having gotten funding from KS. Knowing what I know now, I realize why I was branded as a scammer from before the KS even ended. If I saw me today, trying to Kickstart a similar project , knowing what I know now, I’d think it was a bullshit cash grab too. I was just very ignorant and too trusting.”

(Source: Kickstarter)

Counter Strike Co-Creator Arrested For Sexual Exploitation of Child


Seattle police this week arrested Jess A. Cliffe, co-creator of the video game Counter Strike, and are planning on charging him with sexual exploitation of a child. Valve has released a statement to Kotaku that Cliffe has been suspended until more details are made known.

“We are still learning details of what actually happened. Reports suggest he has been arrested for a felony offense. As such we have suspended his employment until we know more.”

(Source: Kotaku)

[NM] Electronic Arts Gives Wrong Numbers On Battlefront II Sales, A Lot of Websites Haven’t Corrected It


Electronic Arts released their third quarter results for the 2018 fiscal year this week, noting increased revenues to $1.16 billion compared to $1.14 billion last year with higher operating expenses. Sales were driven primarily by live games including the various Ultimate Team systems and The Sims 4, with little doubt to the notion that last November’s Star Wars: Battlefront II under performed according to EA’s expectations.

What is in dispute, surprisingly, is how much the game under performed and just how many units the game sold, and the reason behind this confusion appears to be EA’s own error. According to Wall Street Journal’s tech reporter Sarah Needleman, EA confirmed in a statement under an embargo that Battlefront II had shipped over nine million units, about a million shorter than they had anticipated.

In actuality, and according to EA’s own released prepared remarks, the game was expected to sell about eight million and fell short of that by less than one million. So EA’s own reports were upwards of two million less than what they had incorrectly stated.

For Q3, we had expected to sell in about 8 million units, but we fell short of that by less than 1 million units. However, this shortfall was significantly offset by an excellent performance from our live services. The impact of FX was immaterial on the quarter.

Needleman has acknowledged on Twitter that the numbers she was given were incorrect with the earnings call not releasing until hours after the embargo lifted. Evidently nobody informed the rest of the reporters that this information was incorrect, since as of midnight on January 31, MMO Fallout had perused at least a dozen major gaming/tech websites that had covered the story, and not a single one had followed up with a correction.

Understandable, since virtually all of the articles seem to merely copy and paste either information from Polygon.com’s coverage or directly from Needleman’s initial tweet. In fact, the only major news website that reported on this and managed to get it right appears to be VG247 who actually read the prepared remarks and highlighted the discrepancy with the WSJ’s numbers. At least one of the outlets we read actually linked to the prepared statement and even claimed that the report stated the 9 million figure, which suggests the author did not even read the document that they quoted.

Calling malice seems to be a long shot, it looks like the Wall Street Journal was sent incorrect information and while the While Street Journal corrected their story, none of the outlets that sourced the Tweet did any fact checking of their own or took the time to read EA’s following prepared statement.

Gigantic To Shut Down Following Motiga Layoffs


Following their statement in November that Perfect World Entertainment had laid off a number of staff at Motiga, we have learned this week that MOBA title Gigantic will shut down. As of today, purchasing of rubies and hero packs have been disabled, and all heroes will be free until the servers shut down at the end of July.

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the January Update is the final content update for Gigantic, and the game servers will be discontinued on July 31, 2018. The journey over these last few years was met with outstanding support from our players and we are all very proud of the incredible experience Gigantic is today.

Motiga and Perfect World had been seeking ways to keep the game sustainable, unfortunately Gigantic did not resonate with a base large enough to keep the game going. Gigantic follows in the steps of Paragon which recently announced its own sunsetting for just the same reason.

(Source: Gigantic)

Epic Settles Lawsuit Against Minor Fortnite Cheater


Epic Games has agreed to voluntary dismissal and settlement in its lawsuit against a minor filed last year in the eastern district of North Carolina court. As part of the lawsuit and due to the defendant being a minor, certain documents have been sealed on order of the court and the defendant has since been simply named by his initials M.F. Epic had instigated the lawsuit after filing a DMCA takedown notice against the defendant’s video allegedly advertising cheats in their game Fortnite. When the defendant counter-claimed the video, Epic issued its complaint to the court.

Plaintiff Epic Games, Inc., by and through its attorneys, hereby gives notice of the settlement and dismissal of this action. Each party shall bear its or his own attorneys’ fees and costs.

The terms of the settlement are not being made public. Epic’s other lawsuit against another minor is still being pursued, with a recent court document submitted detailing issues that the prosecution had with finding and serving the defendants.

(Source: Court Dockets)

Early Access: Tower Of Time Hands On Impressions


Tower of Time is hoping to continue the legacy of games like Baldur’s Gate and so far my time with the early access version has proven it a worthy successor. It strikes me as exactly the kind of title that hardcore RPG enthusiasts would be happy to get their hands on, the combination of strategic gameplay, stat building, and a so far compelling story that’ll have you up until two in the morning trying to figure out the best builds for your characters.

In short, this game is pretty fun, and it’s also tough as hell.

Rather than trying to go over every aspect of the game in this preview, I want to discuss the meat and potatoes of Tower of Time, that being its combat encounters. I find myself rather impressed by the fact that a game where you’re not directly controlling your characters requires as much attention to be paid as this game does. While you don’t control your character’s standard attacks, you do direct them around the field of combat and activate their special abilities when necessary.

Combat in Tower of Time is very heavily reliant on line of sight mechanics, with battles easily won and lost based on how you position your characters and keep them working with each other. Kane is the party tank, able to raise walls and absorb damage while your other party members pepper the enemy with attacks. Maeve is a marksman, high on damage but low on defense abilities. Aeric is a druid, able to summon an ent and more adept at party healing than Kane.

There are also plenty of ways to customize your characters, and you’ll need to be paying attention to the deficits in your team in order to properly build in response to them. For instance, I upgraded Maeve’s arrows with the ability to inflict blindness, making Tower of Time one of the few games in which casting blindness on NPCs is useful. Blind is great in this game because combat encounters at least early on have a habit of throwing wraiths at you which cast an ongoing life drain as long as they have line of sight. Now Kane’s wall can break this line of sight, but it can easily just push some enemies into attacking the more vulnerable characters. By giving Maeve the ability to blind them, I could very quickly put a stop to multiple life drains.

In a sense, you can think of each match like its own tower defense mini-game, like a puzzle of sorts where you need to carefully move your pieces around the board to handle each threat as it appears. For me this has basically come down to getting my ass handed to me on a silver platter in some matches a couple of times before I figure out the best way to maneuver my characters around. Arrow Time, Tower of Time’s branded bullet time effect, is both helpful and necessary to keep the action from getting overwhelming, not to mention handy in keeping track of who is targeting who (seen above).

You’ll have the opportunity to bring on more companions, up to seven from the looks of the roster, but the few hours I’ve spent in the game so far have only given me access to three. Presumably if I play the game as intended and put more time into crafting/enchanting gear using the available facilities in town.

I look forward to diving further into Tower of Time.

Is Paragon Unsustainable? Yes, Also Shutting Down


It’s barely been ten days since we reported that Paragon was likely unsustainable and that Epic would be giving it another look in the coming weeks.

“Over the next few weeks, we’ll be figuring out if and how we can evolve Paragon to achieve growth and success, and trying some things internally. In the meantime, Paragon’s release cadence will be slower.”

Evidently the decision was much easier than originally thought, because a week after this announcement Epic has announced the imminent closure of Paragon. In a rare statement, Epic took full responsibility for Paragon’s inability to draw in players, and apologized for failing the community despite the team’s hard work.

We didn’t execute well enough to deliver on the promise of Paragon. We have failed you — despite the team’s incredibly hard work — and we’re sorry.

Servers will shut down on April 26, however Epic warns that the quality of matchmaking will degrade naturally as players leave. Epic is offering full refunds for every purchase on any platform.

Instructions for a refund are as follows:

  1. If you’re not playing on PC, link your Epic account (create one if necessary).
  2. If you play on PC, or have already linked your Epic account, you can request your refund here.

(Source: Epic)