Video-Game Law: The Niche Legal Practice Du Jour?

[WSJ_law_blog]

As close followers of the Law Blog will remember, this blogger hasn’t played a video game since mastering Paperboy at Tustin Lanes back in 1985.
But we understand that since then, they’ve taken off. It’s a $50 billion industry and new, more improbable-seeming games pop up on a near-daily basis. (Iron Chef for the Wii, anyone?). Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised that a new hip crew of west coast lawyers is springing up to cater largely to the industry.

At Greenberg Glusker, for example, repping video-game makers has become a big money-generator. We “found that video games in many ways represented the future of the entertainment industry,” said Jonathan Fitzgarrald, a spokesman for the firm.

In a lot of ways, repping video-game makers is just like repping companies from any other industry. You’ve got your contract disputes, your employment kerfuffles, your trade-secret claims to investigate. But, according to the above-linked LA Times article, the industry is seeing more consumer class-action defense work. For instance, according to the article, Microsoft has been hit by several suits for flaws in its Xbox 360 game console that cause the device to crash. Activision was sued because its Guitar Hero III game for the Wii game console allegedly did not feature surround sound as its packaging claimed. Electronic Arts Inc.

And some nuances exist to the practice. For instance, game companies routinely stage critiques at the end of every major game project. These postmortems, meant to improve future games, are brutally frank in pointing out the flaws of even successful titles.

But in contract disputes, the notes from these critiques can be used to assign blame, said MacIsaac of Greenberg Glusker.

“It’s something that’s unique to the game industry,” she said. “Knowledge of how postmortems typically work in the development process can be critical to a case.”