The developers of the Friday the 13th video game say they’re cancelling all future DLC because of an ongoing lawsuit regarding the franchise.
Screenshot: Friday the 13th (Gun Media)
Since 2016, Victor Miller, the screenwriter of the original Friday the 13th movie, has been engaged with a legal dispute regarding his work on the film, which has prevented any new movies in the franchise from being made.
For a while, the game avoided this dispute, but according to the developers at Gun Media, they’re now forced to cancel their planned downloadable content.
“When we originally learned that the game fell within the crosshairs of this legal dispute, we tried to balance the creation of new content requested by our fans against the maintenance and bug fixing that our community expects and deserves. We attempted to do both within the limits of the legal case,” they said in a press release today.
“We’ve now been forced to accept that the lawsuit makes future content for the game, including alternate play modes, new playable Jasons and Counselors, and new maps, unfeasible now or in the future.”
Cancelled content includes “Uber Jason”, the Grendel Map, new cosmetics and new counsellors.
Although Gun Media can’t make any new content for Friday the 13th, they say they are still dedicated to launching dedicated servers for consoles and maintaining the game as it currently exists.
Comments
4 responses to “Friday The 13th Game Loses DLC Because Of Legal Battle Over The Movies”
Fuck! They just managed to balance the game, optimise it, make a single player mode thats fun and really hit their stride too… work this shit out quick!!!
Judging from the article linked its going to be quite a while before this stuff gets sorted out.
It’s a case of writer trying to claim back ownership vs studio saying they own the rights. There’s going to be an insane back and forth on courts here trying to prove whether the writing done for Friday the 13th was a “For Hire” work or not.
My undertsanding of cinema, and creation of film is that a production company such as Miramax, Universal and so on, provide the ability to make the film and so on, but retaining all rights to the film being created. This is probably old early days cinema, but isnt that prevalent?
Note my understanding is extremely minimal here but AFAIK it depends on the situation. If the screenplay/script was created by a writer and pitched as an idea and its agreed to be funded the writer still gets to keep the rights to the work unless they explicitly give their rights way OR work done is under “For Hire” clause which means its owned by the studio/producer.
The argument here is that the original writer who pitched Friday the 13th is expressing his right of control over his creation. The studio is claiming that the work was “For Hire” hence he gave away his rights ti Friday the 13th