Yesterday, Reuters "broke" the story that Electronic Arts was taking steps to distance itself from real-world gun makers, cancelling licensing deals while still maintaining the right to use images of those real-world weapons in its first-person shooters. "The action games we will release this year will not include licensed images of weapons," EA spokesperson Jeff Brown said matter-of-factly in the story.
What that story failed to make clear was that EA has never paid or been paid to feature specific guns in its games. This year's titles will be no different.
The confusion stems from an odd cross-marketing/charity arrangement between EA and some gun manufacturers as part of last year's promotion of Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Brown told Ars Technica in an e-mail that the Warfighter team set up a charity to support war veterans and encouraged the gun makers featured in the game to contribute. The weapons makers that decided to donate, including the McMillan Group and Magpul, were in turn featured prominently on a sub-page of the official Warfighter website as "authentic brands" in the game and were cross-promoted in some Web videos about the game.
Even this loose connection to a real-world gun maker was apparently too much for EA, though, as the company eventually removed any links to the gun makers' websites from the charity sub-page. Many media accounts suggested this move was made in response to growing public controversy over the links. While Brown said the decision to remove the links was made in August 2012, "before the criticism appeared," the links were still there in time for The Gameological Society to write a widely read criticism of the company's cross-promotion.
In any case, Brown said, "zero money from the manufacturers ever went to EA—all money went directly to the veterans' charity." Furthermore, EA has never paid a licensing fee to a gun maker to include their weapons in a game, nor has it been paid by a gun maker to feature its particular weapons. "No other EA game or service has used licensed gun images in a game," Brown said.
As the Reuters story notes, EA considers the use of authentic weaponry to be a fair use of gun makers' trademarks. "We're telling a story and we have a point of view," EA President of Labels Frank Gibeau told Reuters. "A book doesn't pay for saying the word 'Colt,' for example."
This legal theory isn't unique to EA. A spokesman for Bushmaster parent company Freedom Group told the New York Times in December that it had "received no payment, nor have we paid for placement of our products in Call of Duty." While EA is currently involved in a court case surrounding its use of a branded Bell Helicopter in its Battlefield games, no court cases have dealt with unlicensed weaponry in video games.
Why not? Probably because gun makers and video game producers have a symbiotic relationship. The game makers benefit by featuring real weapons that make their games seem more "authentic," while the gun makers benefit from what is essentially free advertising to millions of people (though that symbiosis can work in the opposite direction when guns and/or violent games become bad PR). Still, this hasn't required a formal business or licensing relationship between the game companies and the gun manufacturers so far.
EA may be feeling a little gun shy (pun kind of intended) after last year's loose charity partnership backfired (pun definitely intended). Still, as far as the guns being featured in EA's shooters are concerned, it's business as usual.
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