Legal trends for the games industry in 2022 | Opinion
Dr Andreas Lober and Luca Guidobaldi
Monday 24th January 2022
Some legal journals look back on legal developments of the preceding year. We have taken our crystal balls and look into the future. Here are our predictions for 2022.
We do not know yet if and when the Metaverse will become the reality Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Sweeney are dreaming of. But we know for sure that a lot of money will be spent on this vision, and the games industry is in a pole position.
This will revive a lot of legal questions that were first discussed when virtual worlds were a hot topic: rights in virtual property, personality rights of avatars, interchangeability of virtual objects, and who is responsible if they lose their value (for whatever reason). So far, games companies tend to take the position that virtual objects have no "real world" value. This will become increasingly difficult if and when the Metaverse is a place designed for commercial activities.
It will also be an interesting conceptual and almost philosophical revolution for the whole sector: in a virtual reality environment where everything is meant to have the "look and feel" of a video game -- from a shopping session to a meeting with friends and even a concert or a night at the movies -- then games as we know them today will probably have to change and adapt in order to become the 'amusement park' of the new world: probably more entertaining, more extreme, more magic.
This will certainly bring more investments and big technology advancements, not only for the content creation and the software part but also for the hardware side; we already know that manufacturers and console makers are fighting over visors and augmented reality tools to make their users' experience grow and grow.
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