Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Wizards of the Coast hold the rights to the D&D license, not to Baldur's Gate and others. Assuming Beamdog is the owner of the BG/IWD titles, the only thing WotC could have done is to require Beamdog to NOT sell the old games separately when granting the use of the D&D license for the remakes.
Personally, I dislike the new versions. In BG's case, they destroy the experience of being a level 1 character. You get overpowered very quickly. They also destroyed the ingame animations and opening video, introduced tons of bugs (of which I don't know how many are fixed), and they added sub-par, unneeded content.
If you have the old versions, it'll take you about an hour to mod BG1 + BG2 into a single game (BG Trilogy) with all the mods and extra characters and quests you desire. You'll get really close to, and maybe even surpass what the Enhanced editions offer.
|
This is a bit off-topic, but I should clarify this, as I often read such statements.
Baldur's Gate is IP and this IP, just as the whole D&D thingy, has its owner.
Intellectual property rights have many forms and there can be an agreement between the interested parties affecting all, several or only one of them. Copyright Law of the United States grants certain rights to the owner of a copyright in a work:
- the right to reproduce the copyrighted work;
- the right to prepare derivative works based upon the work;
- the right to distribute copies of the work to the public;
- the right to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
- the right to display the copyrighted work publicly.
The distribution right grants to the copyright holder the right to make a work available to the public by sale, rental, lease, or lending.
This right allows the copyright holder to prevent the distribution of unauthorized copies of a work.
An ultimate license holder (and owner) of Baldur's Gate is either Hasbro (as shown here -
http://gamerant.com/baldurs-gate-3-legal-problems/), or Wizards of the Coast, the subsidiary of Hasbro. The GoG link I gave confirms it was WotC who decided about the ways to distribute original Baldur's Gate games.
So only Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast can decide to whom they grant distribution rights regarding Baldur's Gate.
Beamdog is only a licensee, not a licensor. They cannot decide about distribution rights regarding Baldur's Gate.