Gamertell

These days an ideological line seems to divide the whole world into two halves. On one side of this ideological equator are the gamers and on the other side are the detractors of video games. Due to the increasing number of controversies around video games, some of which lead to court cases, video game lawyers are experiencing a windfall. Another major reason for video game lawyers earning serious bucks is the fact that the video game industry is flooded with cash and future growth prospects look even better.

The games industry is on an all time high and is expected to overtake even the music industry in terms of sales sometime next year according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. The firm has also pegged video game sales this year at $10.4 billion, an increase of 15.5% 2006. The boom in the video gaming industry has provided new, lucrative avenues to lawyers. They tend to perform a wide array of legal tasks within the games industry.

Most of them don’t function like workman-like attorneys with insipid personalities, but have a real penchant and passion for video games and the industry in general. However, they have to perform some monotonous tasks, like drafting legal contracts.  There most important job is safeguarding intellectual property rights, copyrights and trademarks. Had they not been there then, perhaps, every other game would have featured popular game characters like Mario and Masterchief without the consent of the respective owners of these game characters.

Some of the lawsuits concerning IP, copyright, patent or trademark infringement are worth several millions, which translates to bigger bucks for game attorneys as well. There is also a general perception among video game lawyers that the industry is changing rapidly. One such change, or development, is the popularity of casual games is on a high. More and more people are developing these easy-to-make games that don’t need a huge investment in terms of labor and money. These niche game developers are also more inclined upon selling the games directly to the gamers, sidelining the publishers. More developers implies more business for these attorneys as there are more contracts to draft, and more IP, trademarks and copyrights to protect.

Read [Journal Record]

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