My question about licensed guns in games.

I'm not sure if it's cool to go all "Hey we're super cool you guys, look at these weapons manufacturers we endorse! please buy our game oh god", but quietly lending a bit of authenticity to your games by getting the licences for real weapons seems fine. MGS probably handles it with the most taste when it's not batshit crazy, but I never really had a problem with the way Modern Warfare did it either.

At the end of the day, companies that make guns are just like all the other giant soulless corporations out there, so they're not really worth getting upset about.

It's fine to both have and advertise licensed firearms in your game, but promoting it does seem silly to me. You can have those guns in your game and just call them by an imaginary name, and the experience is basically the same for the end-user, so why highlight it as a selling point? People jumped up EA's ass because (1) they're EA, (2) the game got insane flak for using real-world, on-going conflicts, and (3) media is made up of a lot of "socially-conscious" naval-gazers.

If the purpose of the licensing deal is to have real firearms represented in the game then, who cares. However, it does come off as a bit desperate when they need to use the partnership as a marketing tool.

I like how DICE does it, where they have all the guns you want in the games, but they often use their generic military designations as opposed to manufacturers and the like. I still don't understand why they had to shorten MP5K to M5K, though. I bet it has to do with H&K being a tad bit litigious, and/or having an existing licensing deal in place with Activision/Call of Duty.

@greggd: Ah, so that's where names like ACW-R come from. It all makes sense now.

Maybe they should save that litigation money to make guns that don't melt.

BLAZOW.

Simon Parkin wrote a really good article on gun licensing in games for Eurogamer two years ago: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-02-01-shooters-how-video-games-fund-arms-manufacturers

These types of marketing seems kind of dicey either way, but I don't see any way around it either.

Definitely something like that yeah, hence why the HK416 and HK417 are M416 and M417 respectively.

4) They went "And you can buy these guns here! WARFAREIGHTING!" It wasn't so much "we have these guns and their real names", which most people do, it was using the game site to sell people actual firearms (IIRC).

Of course, EA also sent out brass knuckles with review copies of the Godfather, so....

I see no difference between that and licensed cars.

Growing up in a place where I can count the number of non-police guns I've seen on one hand, I think paying for a gun license is silly. I play a fair number of shooters, but I don't think I've ever noticed if a gun is licensed or not. Maybe for people more familiar with guns it's like having licensed cars in a simulation-style racing game.

I prefer licensed cars in games, especially when they're more sim like & the extra effort has been made to get them to perform in game to reality as much as possible. Saying that though everyone has some idea of how a car should perform & what cars should out perform others. When it comes to guns though, I appreciate the effort that goes into reproducing real guns but there's more emphasis on balancing over realism so at the end of the day it doesn't matter as much.

Advertising on the other hand, I don't mind logos at the start of the game or on the side of a race track, anymore than that on a game I've paid full price for (free to play is a different story I guess) & I'll start to have an issue with it whether it's guns or soft drinks.

If I thought about it, I don't even know if I'd treat EA linking to Bushmaster's store or whatever any differently than I'd take Turn 10 offering you this hot Honda Civic, only two previous owners, you can drive it away today... I don't know if I support ghettoizing anything, and the treatment seems like the same taboos around cigarette sales or sale of pornography. Out of sight out of mind, et al.

I wonder if video games have ever used real-world cigarette brands, like if Snake said he smoked Lucky Strikes. Says EXACTLY THAT on Wikipedia.

@brodehouse: I would say that there is a difference between selling a vehicle and a weapon through a game. One is ostensibly a non-lethal vehicle that is prohibitively expensive for a naive person to get a hold of though an in-game link. The other is a lethal weapon that is much cheaper and much more immediately dangerous in untrained hands. I have no idea what the process is for purchasing a gun in the US though, so maybe those direct links weren't especially dangerous in reality. It just looks extra skeezy when a game that sells a facsimile of warfare also acts as a gateway into actual warfare.

Use military designs and designations and this rarely becomes an issue - anything more is unnecessary and gratuitous in my view.

The really fun part of this line of thought is when you realize that way more people die from cars than guns. I don't know what the Institute for Highway Safety thinks they're doing but they need to step their game up.

If you like guns, and I am guessing you like girls then there is an anime Upotte!! about girls that are guns you should see. I mean the girls are called after various guns and their personalities are based on their respective gun. It's like someone said "what if this gun was a girl, what would it be like?" And did an anime based on it.