10 top legal tips if you're making a F2P game

hi yeah so my name is jazz pural I am a Digital entertainment lawyer and I'm going to be talking for the next 15 minutes about everything you need to know about free-to-play games regulation now I feel sorry for you poor guys fairly early in the morning and you're having to deal with a lawyer so I'll tell you a lawyer joke instead my favorite lawyer joke so a man calls up a lawyer and he says how much will you charge for me to ask you three questions and the lawyer says ,000 and the guy says wow that's a hell of a lot of money isn't it and the lawyer says yes it is what's your third question there you go so I'm going to talk with you about four things in the next few minutes I'm going to tell you a little bit about what this free-to-play regulation is and why the why the European Union is beginning to regulate it what's actually been happening I'm going to give you my 10 practical tips and then talk a little bit about the future so first of all who am I a few few words about me so I'm a

Digital entertainment and Technology lawyer at at the firm which I run pure while and partners I've been working in the games industry for 10 years in London and in Silicon Valley as well as in Continental Europe I advis game studios uh Publishers um and platforms on a whole bunch of legal issues I write a blog and I'm on Twitter as well so go check that stuff out but enough of me um the reason why free-to-play games are coming under legal scrutiny there's three things which are beginning to coales and have led to the Regulators finally getting interested in this area It's a combination of children beginning to use mobile games and mobile apps it's the Triumph of the free-to-play business model which of course has been happening for a while now in the west but The Regulators are only just beginning to understand what it is and lastly it's the perceived need to protect consumers in an online World each of those three things has been there for a while since before the first iPhone but they're now beginning to com Bine in ways which are leading to to

regulation to Regulators to courts getting involved of course it's not as if this was a totally unregulated area before there's all different kinds of laws that lawyers like me have advised games companies on for a while but the question is is that enough is data Privacy Law consumer protection laws is that enough on its own to regulate free to play and the answer from The Regulators in the EU is no we need to have a specific set of laws to govern free to play whether we like it or not not so the specifics in the EU so far there's a few things that have been happening and last year was the inflection point last year was when these things began to happen in Earnest um last year the UK's consumer protection regulator what was called the ofof decided they were going to carry out an investigation of free-to-play games most people in the industry didn't realize it was happening but they went and talked to a number of games companies big and small and released what they call free-to-play principles eight of them which they expect all games companies who are operating ating

in the UK to comply with at the same time the European commission felt that they were a little bit worried about what was happening across the whole of the EU and so they got a number of regulators together they talked with apple Google Microsoft a bunch of other folks and they've come up with principles too um at the same time back in the UK we've had a separate regulator totally separately coming up with a series of Investigations of mobile games um with quite worrying uh consequences which I'll talk about in a moment and lastly that the the the wild card of all is Germany which is really well known for a very stringent protective consumer system including in games now wising up to applying those stringent rules to mobile games each of these four things totally uncoordinated but all arising from the popularity of mobile games so I'm going to talk next about my top tips I don't like to give legal caveat just for the sake of it but here it is it is worth it don't just take these next 10 tips as the gospel if you're making a free-to-play game in Europe it's

probably worth having a chat with a lawyer about your game specifically itself but that said I'm going to talk about these next 10 tips now so tip number one if a mobile game isn't totally free you can't call it free um now both the UK regulators and the European commission really disliked the idea of calling a free-to-play game free this happens quite a lot it used to happen even at the mobile even at the platform level um and that's changed so it's fairly easy now for Apple to have made its change as you will all have seen it used to say free when you downloaded a free-to-play game now it says get similarly with Android it now says install the reason for that was both in the US and the EU the platforms came under a lot of pressure and they were being told it's misleading future tell consumers a free-to-play game is free and of course despite the fact that the industry was trying to explain what we meant by free they didn't buy it now the real question that's remaining is can developers use the word free in

relation to a free-to-play game without getting into legal trouble so take that example this is on this is on the Google Play Store right now bejel still refers to Beed as free I suspect it's a matter of time before we get a Crackdown from The Regulators to the platforms and the platforms then put pressure on the developers to say you can't even in your description refer to a game as free if it's free to play it's unfortunate um but that's the direction that we're moving in tip number two is to get the app page right so which of these do you think is the best legally these are all descriptions from the bottom of an app description um because there's so many of you I I won't ask you to raise your hands but just have a quick think in your head and I'll tell you what I think it's that one not just because it's got the most words and lawyers love words but because it is actually the one that's the most carefully thought through it talks about the different kinds of virtual currency there can be in the game bananas and tokens

it explains that it's optional to use them it explains that you can choose to wait if you want to rather than pay money to acquire the currency if you want to um and it talks about how the purpose of spending real money is to skip ahead this is all obvious stuff but The Regulators love this kind of stuff because you're not assuming a level of knowledge to Consumers and that's the main problem that Regulators have with free-to-play games developers either they're not thinking about it or they just assume the developers understand how the model works so you will see more of this this year and you will see more of it next year I know that traditionally in games you'd have great big long legal teases which no one would read and mobile was fairly free of those it's going to come to mobile for reasons like this similarly all mobile games without exception should now have terms and conditions and a privacy policy not just because it's good legal practice but because that's what the Regulators have said you have to have one and if you're going to have one not only have you got to get the right wording and get it right and talk to a lawyer and all the rest of it but stick it in the app description it's not

very hard uh mobile games which have got a good lawyer on board now they will have done three things the first thing they'll do is at the bottom of the app description they'll have it in the actual text the second thing they'll do is there's an option on both uh Android and iOS to refer to it right at the bottom as I done on the right hand image there that's just an easy way for consumers to can find it to find it the Third Way which is still finding some traction is to put it in the game the guidance from the regul is that you have to have the t's and C's in a place that the consumers could find it and so again you will probably see this year some action taken against mobile games on either iOS or Google Play to say where are your t's and C's and that's just beginning to happen it's by no means Universal so watch this space next tip give consumers a direct route to you it's an easy it's an easy thing to do in your in your inapp description give an email address a Twitter address or or maybe even a Facebook address but give users a direct

way to reach you again it makes good sense it's good sense commercially but it's also a legal requirement under the free-to-play guidelines because the EU said they received a whole bunch of complaints from consumers who didn't know who to talk to I mean I've also had clients that have said to me that once they've done this they notice a fall in onear reviews of their games because people use the onear reviews as a way to communicate frustration so it makes sense commercially and legally as well next tip consider gating your games um and I only need to point to Clash of Clans which is doing this and if Clash of Clans and Candy Crush are doing things like this it then it's something to think about it also makes sense again because the the free-to-play guidelines they don't explicitly require you to have a gate like this but finding some way to give a communication like that the first time only is probably a sensible way to ward off problems now there are some companies who are going even further than that this is what electronic carts does with all of its

chillingo games my understanding is this is now all chillingo games of which there were well over a thousand when you start the game for the first time you go through an actual age gate now that's partly for data privacy reasons but it also serves to have an impact on the free-to-play reasons as well you at the moment there's no legal rule requiring you to do this but doing this is a relatively easy fix to do the first time someone uses the game tip number two is that you should process transactions in a store not in the game Regulators really disliked the idea that you could confuse consumers in their view by having popups in the middle of the game Flow to say do you want to spend some real money Regulators in the EU would much rather have a Gap a split so that when they go into a store they know they're being sold to when they're in the game they don't necessarily expect they're being sold to and so for example to two examples there so I'm I'm not mentioning any names of these games specifically you've got the game on the top there which gives you the opportunity in order to actually

play that game session you may have to spend some real money not a good idea you have the example at the bottom which says sorry you don't have sufficient credits to play whatever this aspect of the game is come to the store and you can spend more money that's something which The Regulators prefer more than the first example next example and this is really important always give users the ability to say no this is a great example I've gone through this with a number of developers where if you think about these things in the game design process it's a relatively easy fix but loads of games developers just don't think at the time well what if someone doesn't want to spend money normally what you'll do is either you have a little cross box in the top right hand corner Regulators hated that always give someone the ability to say no or at least not yet because then you're explaining the commercial context a bit better the example at the bottom is particularly egregious because you have a choice of spending a small amount of real money or lots of real money and you have and the consumer has got got no real way apart from the crossbox of

saying no I don't want to spend any money at all and that is going that's the kind of thing which will be policed a bit more in the future um next uh tip and this is the regulator's words offers should be clear not aggressive and not misleading now those are obviously quite generic phrases there's no obvious simple way of ticking a box to say yes I'm doing that it's it's about it's about context and again it's about the concept of thinking about these things during the design phase am I doing something that doesn't have an assumed level of knowledge that a consumer that has never played a free-to-play game before won't be prejudiced by so I'll give you an example here and the next three examples all relate to starter packs which is a particular uh matter of importance because then you're trying to of course monetize the user as soon as possible and therefore it's the area that could be abused the most easily so the fact that there's a yes and a no option for this sta pack is good the fact that it takes place um in in a store is also a good idea um because it splits up commercial

intent from gameplay but it has to be a genuine timer and I'm going to come back to that in a second next example here an indication this is probably compliant is again there's a yes and no timer which is good but indications that it might not be compliant are the does it take place in the store or in the game we can't be sure it probably is in the game rather than in the store um it's not completely clear how much money is actually being spent you'd have to actually look quite carefully into the top left hand corner as an average consumer to know that you're spending £2.99 because that's not really what the what the developer wants you to see um is it truly a onetime offer only I mean I would Hazard guess the average consumer might be skeptical that a Grenadier a particular piece of content will only ever be available if you spend money straight away that's probably quite unlikely so if it's not a one-time only offer that's deceptive and secondly um is the grenader only available with that particular offer again we don't know but this this would wor a regulator

this would wor a regulator even more unfortunately for a number of reasons yes there's a yes and no option which is good um does a transaction take place in store in the game we don't know the real money value is hidden behind gems you can't see what the real world value of this is is it truly a rare offer I don't know and even after the user says no you have a cartoony popup that says are you sure that you want to that that you want to say no that's possibly a little bit too aggressive so we have to be quite careful about things like that next thing pretty easy but you'd be surprised that how many games don't do it always give users the ability to get paid currency without actually paying for it it can be through achievements like in Clash of Clans it can be through going to Facebook it can be through any number of things but Regulators have come down informally already on a couple of games where they decided that the only way of using the gems was effectively to pay for it they said that's just not fair lastly you have to be super careful regarding kids I know we've had this issue since the comics books in since

the comics way back in the 20s we have to protect the kids but like it or not a lot of regulators are focusing on freet to-play games as a children's problem so if you are marketing directly to kids or you think it might be attractive to kids you have to be careful now what does that mean we don't really know but The Regulators have given some indications if it's a cartoon type game if it's on the kids section of the app stores those are things which mean you have to be extra cautious now one example in particular which is just shows how much of a wild card Factor this is is the game Forge decision now game Forge is a very responsible very successful German games company they had a case gone all the way up to the highest court in Germany recently because the German uh Regulators looked at a small section a really small section of advertising text and said because it will referred to do in in the in the informal term in German because it used English terms because it was slang it must have been directed at kids and therefore they just forced game Forge to go through this long series of litigation and the game wasn't even intended to be for kids like 5% of the player base was for kids but The Regulators didn't care so even if you

take some care unfortunately there are going to be some mobile games this year which are totally unjustifiably taken to legal action because of a perception that we've got to protect the kids so what can we see this year we're probably going to see the first enforcement action in the UK we will probably see follow-up Wild Card litigation in Germany one of France Italy or Spain are going to get involved in this as well all of this is going to be in a totally unin um uncoordinated way um but the real unknown factor that that worries me and and I deal with clients with more and more is what happens if a regulator to starts deciding if freeo play is fair or not the only example we've had so far of that is a case involving Dungeon Keeper which you may or may not be aware of it was um it had a lot of controversy about it and a consumer went off to the one of the UK regulators and said we're not happy with this unlike any other regulator so far this regulator looked at the actual game mechanics and they said that they didn't think that the game mechanics was game

play which would be expected by consumers now goodness knows what's going to happen in 2015 if a regulator starts deciding that they are responsible for what consumers are going to expect in freetop playay we may not like it but it's an issue that we're going to have to engage with this year so I hope that's been a very quick summary of of 10 tips and uh that's me thanks great thanks J that's great um I think it's also quite interesting think the ASA one's interesting particularly because their remit is different from some of the other Regulators particularly because um they have they often have to make um interpretations on the the rightness of a of a property so I wonder whether that's an influence and my hope is that there's so much influence from the the trade bodies in the various countries to try and Lobby in our favor to prevent uh regulatory bodies trying to get involved in game design that I think hopefully we've got some defense is that fair or am I being

optimistic yeah for sure I think one of the best things that you can do platforms developers everyone is obviously have a look at this online afterwards at SlideShare um talk to your trade bodies talk talk with your lawyer um and the next time that you're developing a free to-play game do take advice from the trade bodies about what can I do sensibly to to try and ward off some of these issues um but you're right the trade bodies are helping a great deal yeah so I would normally want to reach out and get questions at this point but I'm realiz in I'm running over a little bit longer than I meant to so I'm getting a thumbs up from the back to tell me to speed things up so I'm going to thank Jaz very much if you give me round Applause I'm sure Jazz will be around and be able to answer questions as well I'll be the back thanks thanks very much [Applause] guys