Bethesda Sues Interplay Over Fallout License, MMO Plans

Bethesda Softworks has filed a complaint with the District Court of Maryland to forbid Interplay from selling older Fallout titles. The complaint alleges that Interplay failed to hold up its end of an agreement that required it to submit marketing and packaging details to Bethesda for approval. In addition to that, Interplay was supposed to initiate full-scale development of a Fallout MMO by April, 2009, gathering at least $30 million in funding to work on the game. "If Bethesda prevails, Interplay would lose the rights to develop the Fallout MMO. There is little to show for the progress of the Fallout MMO in public venues, although many speculate that a mysterious title called Project V13 is in fact the Fallout MMO."

Gog.com

[Carra]

I've bought the original Fallout games from gog.com a few months ago. And thanks to the lack of DRM you can't deactivate those anymore!

Shame on Bethesda

[Anonymous Coward]

At least they aren't going after the Russians who created the most hardcore online PVP game (mod), Fallout Online. Unfortunately, the English server sucks unless you like building stuff constantly and resource gathering. :( http://fonline2238.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

Re:Gog.com

[ewanm89]

As Bethesda is one of the company that tries to do the least DRM they can get away with (Elder Scrolls: Oblivion IV only requires a disc in the right volume label) and fallout3 only uses the most basic disc inserted check securom is able to do. I do not think they'll go as far as to deactivate the legacy games. Also, not that interplay were under the terms of the contract still legally able to sale the legacy games, they just were suppose to allow Bethesda to check marketing material and were suppose to have started dev of the MMO version. The first is actually quite important in the RPG world, as with the rights transfer so did who said what is and isn't officially Fallout lore, and all RPGs take lore seriously as it's a fundamental point of RPGs.

Honestly, this is frustrating on both sides...

[Anonymous Coward]

That Bethesda would ask Interplay to sign such a stupid agreement (re: packaging and marketing for the older games) and that Interplay would sign it.

First of all, what marketing and packaging? The marketing basically produces itself: Many people who played Fallout 3 are naturally curious about the first two games in the series, especially when they find out that Fallout 2 came out about a decade prior to Fallout 3. You don't need to "market" it - those who are interested in playing a 10 year old game are going to, and those that aren't interested aren't going to be convinced by a marketing campaign.

Packaging falls into the same boat. Does Bethesda really intend to produce new CDs of the first two Fallout games, put them into new packaging, and ship them to stores? I'd bet not -it wouldn't really be that profitable unless you charge a fair amount of money for the games, and convincing people to buy 10 year old games for more than 10 dollars is going to be a hard sale. In fact, most of the sales of the first two Fallout games that I have seen since F3 came out are from digital download services - which, of course, require no packaging, and most the time sell the games for 10 dollars or lesss.

Interplay is stupid for not trying to retain the rights to the first two games - Bethesda is a big gaming studio and has had some pretty sucessful games, so (back when the deal was going on) I would have been willing to hedge my bets on Fallout 3 being sucessful and boosting sales of the older games.

The MMO is a different story - Zenimax created an online division almost specifically to create the Fallout MMO, and it's pretty obvious that Project V13 isn't going anywhere.