I work in games and in my last workplace I was CTO of a racing simulation; that means I was working with brands that were not only my own in a pretty big way.
The stipulations that were put on us was pretty strong. For example (and it’s not just these guys), Mercedes will not permit you to allow the logo to fall off; If you have a damage model in the game this is annoying. Some won’t allow the car to get dirty, or to deform in a realistic way because it harms a copyright (did you know that the front lights of cars are part of their brand and trademark in most cases).
I’m using a pretty obvious example, that by selling a product that contains these other brands, we are beholden to not represent them in a way they don’t like; it’s part of the transaction for having it.
I can already hear people thinking: but, most games don’t have any third party intellectual property. But that’s less true than you think, even fantasy games will inevitably wind up copying something from our world that is not completely generic. The most annoying ones are the little background things; Rockstar for example will almost assuredly have issues with using the shapes of famous buildings and licensing issues if they make their radio stations too easy to pirate.
It’s a quagmire. Honestly, I’m not even sure why we bother making anything, there seems to always be some random popping their head up seeking another slice.
But does anyone else get embarrassed of their career choice when you read things like this?
I've loved software since I was a kid, but as I get older, and my friends' careers develop in private equity, medicine, law, {basically anything else}, I can tell a distinct difference between their field and mine. Like, there's no way a grown adult in another field evaluates another grown adult in the equivalent mechanism of what we see here. I know this as a fact.
I just saw a comment last week of a guy who proudly serves millions of webpages off a CSV-powered database, citing only reasons that were also covered by literally any other database.
It just doesn't feel like this is right.