- x Foman123 x
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- Master Forum Ninja
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Bungie knows that people have great ideas -- that was the entire thrust of Recon's fantastic and mesmerizing post on page 1 of this thread -- they just will not use the vast, vast majority of them. There is no need to rehash what he said except for the preceding.
But I have one further point to add, which as you will see, is sparked by my profession. Bungie needs to be very careful about taking Community ideas. You will see that very few corporations take ideas of any sort from individual customers or fans. Much of the reason for this is what Recon mentioned in his post, but part of the reason is that it is sound business practice not to.
Welcome to the United States, where you can be sued for doing just about anything that involves another person. Imagine this scenario, played out in your ideal universe: Foman125, a Bungie fan, posts an idea in the Bungie Underground for a new FPS game involving new characters, a detailed storyline, and specifics of gameplay mechanics. Bungie sees the idea and thinks that it is great. Two years later, with a few tweaks (the main characters have been renamed, the storyline has some slight changes, and the gameplay mechanics are fine-tuned), the game is published under Bungie's name. Foman125 is proud and happy that Bungie published his game, right up until a lawyer who happens to frequent the Bungie forums sends him a PM. That lawyer says, "hey, you know, that game content belongs to you -- you should be receiving royalties if not outright receiving all of the profits." Foman125, who is normally a nice guy, is mad because he just recently got blacklisted by Recon Number 54, a forum moderator who went on a banning rampage one night. He sues Bungie. Foman125 and Bungie eventually settle for a couple hundred thousand bucks, but that's a couple hundred thousand bucks that didn't go to the shareholders. Bungie's CEO and its creative director are fired, and in their rage, they burn down the Bungie headquarters. The destruction of such a bastion of sheer awesomeness casts a black cloud that covers most of North America and blocks out the sun. All life on Earth subsequently dies.
Despite the improbability of the last part of that story, the first part has happened many times to many different people and companies. Some examples are: David Chase (accused of stealing fan's ideas for The Sopranos), JK Rowling (sued for accused plaigiarism for Harry Potter), Research in Motion (creators of the Blackberry handheld device), Avril Lavigne (sued for stealing tunes of a band she was allegedly a fan of as a child), and Marion Zimmer Bradley (sued for stealing fan fiction based on her Darkover novels).
Bungie encourages thoughts and ideas, as well as fan fiction, but they will never, ever use it or implement anything that could be considered truly original to the author. So yeah, talking about increasing the strength of the trip mine in Halo 3 is one thing, but don't expect Bungie to put your idea for a character into its next game, no matter how good the idea is.
Hope this helps you out, man.
[Edited on 12.24.2007 4:32 PM PST]