When do we start the clock?
You're right that most games are pushed out the door and get most of their sales within the first few months and are basically abandoned after that.
However there is the trend of "early access" games as well as games that continue to receive updates over time, minecraft or Wow would be examples of these, so there is a more gradual flow of sales.
It's not inconceivable that a game like minecraft could go on for 20 years , even if it's future form bares little resemblance to it's original release.
From a copyright perspective, when a work is published, the clock starts on that work. Even if the work is software and subsequently gets modified, if you retain an older copy, it will expire on schedule. You won't get rights to the new stuff, but you could still, say, extract textures and use them elsewhere. Merely endlessly permuting a work does not give you exclusive rights in perpetuity. You keep building rights to the new stuff, but not the unmodified bits.
Of course this point is entirely theoretical at the moment since it will be many many decades before any video game ever created enters the public domain.
Well, I assume this is true of video games the same way it is true of other art, but because people keep extending copyright terms faster than they expire, it's not clear if anything will every make it to the public domain again. We are scheduled to have some books (presumably published in 1923) enter the public domain in 2019 but you never know what some lobbyists can pull off in the next 5 years.
However there is the trend of "early access" games as well as games that continue to receive updates over time, minecraft or Wow would be examples of these, so there is a more gradual flow of sales.
This trend, I believe, is partly in response to piracy. One might even argue that some derivative of this model (perhaps in conjunction with crowd-funding à la Kickstarter) could succeed even in the absence of copyright law altogether!
They don't reduce piracy (or if they do, it's not relevant). What they do is mitigate the effects of piracy by lowering the risk of development. If your Kickstarter or early access game is successful enough, you may end up paying for the entire development of the game long before you finish developing it. And if it's not successful then you stop development and move on to something else.
That makes sense, crowd sourcing etc can be used to take risk out of development. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say you don't need copyright though. Most crowd-funded games are still under proprietary licenses. Part of the appeal is getting a game earlier / cheaper than you would at release.
If you allow unlimited redistribution you remove much of that incentive.
If you allow unlimited redistribution you remove much of that incentive.
I disagree. The vast majority of games developed today do not have a hope of paying for their own development, copyrighted or otherwise. It's only a very small proportion of games (so-called AAA) that are developed with the expectation of profit.
I'm not sure what you mean, surely all games are produced with an expectation of profit otherwise they would not be made. Discounting small games that people make for gamejams etc.
Take a look at the IndieGaming subreddit (over on Reddit). Every single day I see half a dozen new games pop up. People are making thousands and thousands of new games all the time. Do you honestly believe they all do so with an explicit expectation of profit? No, the basic premise that people do not create without an expectation of profit is false and frankly deeply insulting to humanity.
Most indie games are built with a profit motive to some degree, at the very least they need to cover their costs but I am guessing that most aspire to more than that, so that they can fund their next game.
Maybe lots of them but certainly not all. Lots of games are made for fun and if they are later sold or made free depends on how well they turn out to be and what the devs want to do.
It doesn't really have to be just small games, you can take Dwarf Fortress and Cave Story as examples of "big" games which are both free.
Calling Dwarf Fortres "free" is mostly accurate but it doesn't really help your argument. Tarn Adams keeps ahold of Dwarf Fortress pretty tightly so that his donation stream doesn't dry up so he can continue working on it.
Copyright law already does address the "when does the clock start" issue in great detail (in order to determine when the copyright period expires). We could keep using all that case law, and just adjust the duration of the copyright down.
In particular, making a significant change to a work creates a new copyright for the changed work. If you boot up windows it will say something like "Copyright (C) Microsoft 1983-2013", meaning that the earliest code was written in 1983 and the last significant change was in 2013. That means that this version of Windows will enter the public domain in the year 2014+95. But you can start making copies of the original 1983 version of DOS already in 1983+95.
That sounds like a pretty easy problem: A given release should enter the public domain however many years after it was released. So after 20 years the first release of minecraft would be in the public domain and other people could base new games off that if they wanted, but newer releases would of course remain under copyright (assuming they contained any nontrivial changes).
Then you would not get rights to the new version number, but you could get it to everything else... excepting that that is a bad example as version numbers would not be copyrightable as a brute fact, but more realistically, if you merely add one creative paragraph of flavor text the clock would start anew on that paragraph, but the protection would not magically flow backwards back in time to the entire rest of the content.
Personally, I think the main problem with copyright is not the things were the owners care about them, but where they do not.
Personally, I would be mostly happy with current copyright, with an extension that items must be reregistered every 5 years, and available for sale. That would deal with the huge amount of items (games are a good example) where the original owners don't care enough to release the game as public domain, or often can't even be traced.
I'm not sure the trapdoor is necessary. If the changes are in fact trivial (whatever courts decide), people will just copy/use the public domain version.
It doesn't really matter - as long as someone keeps hold of what was actually released 20 years ago, they can use that, and it won't matter that the release from 19 years ago remains under copyright.
AFAIK, the EVE Online server was never released, and being an MMO, that's where the game actually happens. At that point, it might actually be perpetual. Even if it all was public domain, the creators (CCP Games) would still be in the best position to profit.
However there is the trend of "early access" games as well as games that continue to receive updates over time, minecraft or Wow would be examples of these, so there is a more gradual flow of sales.
It's not inconceivable that a game like minecraft could go on for 20 years , even if it's future form bares little resemblance to it's original release.