The neverending NDA?

by Chris Chester May 5th 2008 at 5:00PM

Filed under: Business models, Game mechanics, Opinion, Legal

Non-disclosure agreements or NDAs have traditionally been thought of as a burden that gamers have only begrudgingly borne because they want early access to a game. For a variety of reasons, developers often don't want people going around and blabbing about their new titles, either because the game is still in a very unfinished state and the comments wouldn't be generally positive, or for marketing reasons having to do with hype and release timing.

So when we read one blogger suggest that a developer actually extend the NDA indefinitely post-release, at first we weren't really sure what to make of the idea. He suggests that it would give developers the leverage to eliminate game guides and third-party sources of information that really marginalize the difficulty of content by letting players gain knowledge of encounters before they've experienced them. He suggests that it would have the benefit of strengthening inter-personal bonds and information sharing within the game. While this is true, we can only imagine the explosive legal battles that would precede this sort of system. Still, it's a novel idea to think about.

[Via Mythical Blog]

Tags: crazy, mythical-blog, nda, non-disclosure-agreement, ole-bald-angus-the-monk

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

GRT said on 6:09PM 5-05-2008

F that. What it would be is a way to try to force people to get some "official game guide" for another $20.

And if the developers didn't have that, and there was really no "outside the game" sources of info, I can't imagine what the chat channels would be like, given how busy they are now with questions. And that's with so many guides available.

And for those people who don't want to spam the chat channels (which as often as not gets you both an answer and half a dozen people calling you a moron and telling you to read the quest info and STFU), they'd just get frustrated and quit playing.

Bad idea all around, IMO.

And here's a word of advice to all these self-style experts out there. You CAN NOT FORCE COMMUNITY.

Angel said on 10:43PM 5-05-2008

you can force community! its called prison...

tansting said on 7:09AM 5-06-2008

Sounds nice on paper - like Communism, but essentially useless in practice. You want people to talk and discuss your game (including spoilers) not stifle it. How on earth do you define NDA breaking acts? When you discuss what to do in level 1 for newbys in a blog - you shut it down? Yeah sure - do all you can to discourage new people in the game.

Also, lots of bugs, mistakes and exploits have been revealed in spoiler discussions, and games have been improved via the spoiler sites dicussing the content. Frankly, if a MMO dev is stupid enough to close off a valuable resource like that, they deserve all the failure they WILL get.