I may never really understand the intricacies of our legal system. Witness: According to the Hollywood Reporter, an organization called the Patent Compliance Group has filed a “qui tam action” against Activision for…not using patents it holds?

From the article:

[The suit alleges that] the games are being improperly advertised as patented or patent-pending. PCP claims that Activision has abused the process by not actually having relevant applications pending and/or not having patents that cover the scope of its marked products.

From what I can gather, this means that Activision is advertising its music games along with patent notices that don’t actually cover the music games being advertised. If I’ve got that right, I can understand the concern: It might lead other game designers to believe that they can’t make similar games because of patent issues, when in truth they might be able to.

But then, I am so very not a lawyer. Anyone with legal experience care to elaborate?

UPDATE: Joystiq has a nice breakdown of the legality of the claims here.

[Read, via Business Insider]

The fallout from Activision’s announcement that they’re scaling back Hero releases has begun, and no Guitar Hero-related development studio seems to have been spared.

Here’s what went down, according to various sources:

Main Guitar Hero developer Neversoft saw 50 employees laid off (via Kotaku), with further rumors (via Binge Gamer) that the entire studio is to be shuttered once the next Guitar Hero is completed. (In…April? Er, OK.) Guitar Hero development is said to be slated to be handed off to Vicarious Visions, the studio responsible for a lot of Activision’s ports to secondary consoles.

Even worse, Underground Development (formerly Z-Axis), the studio responsible for Guitar Hero: Van Halen, appears to have been closed entirely (Kotaku).

And to top it off, RedOctane — the studio responsible for launching the Guitar Hero franchise in the first place — is said to have been completely shut down as well (Kotaku), with only those responsible for developing hardware for the Hero series being offered new positions at Activision.

Note that this is only the Guitar Hero-related fallout from yesterday’s cuts. Activision also made significant layoffs (GameStop) at long-running Prototype developer Radical, and shut down (GamaSutra) True Crime and Vigilante 8 designer Luxoflux. In total, it appears that around 200 employees lost their jobs.

When asked for comment, Activision released a statement to various outlets saying the following:

“Activision Publishing continually evaluates its resources to ensure that they are properly matched against its product slate and strategic goals. In 2010, the company’s sku count will be smaller than in 2009 driven in part, by a decrease in the number of music-based games we will be releasing.

“As we discussed on our earnings conference call yesterday, we are directing our resources against the largest and most profitable business segments, and as part of this initiative, we are realigning our resources to better reflect our slate and the market opportunities.

“At the same time, we are increasing our digital/online capabilities as we expect that digital/online will continue to become a more meaningful part of our business model in the years ahead.”

Wow, no mention of the employees affected at all? Having been the recipient of a layoff myself, allow me to say: That is cold.

[image: astros @ Flickr / CC BY 2.0]