Hopefully it won’t be like Nokia and Stephen Elop.

it’s a poor argument because the game couldn’t exist either without many other companies and individuals having invested millions and millions or their labor in order to release, promote and support other things.

There’s at least the freely available VorpX release only for Cyberpunk 2077. I do hope the VorpX dev doesn’t get spooked by this like he did when the RDR2 takedown happened as he’s doing somewhat similar things in the paid software.

it wasn’t a waste of time and effort because he got paid a living wage doing it at least until now though.

I don’t think you have a clue about the relevant law if you’re saying things like “derivative works are fair use”. They absolutely aren’t which is exactly the reason game devs can exert such strong control over mods generally. Fair use would not necessarily limit commercial use either if it applied here.

In the case of the VR mods they are making the argument that this is not really a derivative work of the games in question at all because it is a generic framework that supports numerous games similar to how an emulator runs all the games of a platform and can present them differently from the original hardware. We won’t get to see how that argument would do in court probably because the modder can’t afford to go to court with these huge companies.

I wouldn’t really say it’s about “property” either. Copyright and all these related rules are a completely man-made concepts unlike real property which has a pretty intuitive basis in our reality where only one person can hold a physical item at a time.

now you’re making me think of a future with a “Silk Road” for game mods. Very cyberpunk.

there’s really no difference, a mod doesn’t necessarily mean modifying the game’s code or assets either, it can be just adding or replacing things with your own code and assets. The game functioning relies just as much on the operating system and the libraries it provides as such a mod does on the game.

That doesn’t really apply in the case of this particular type of mod though. They don’t go out of their way to support these VR mods in any special way.

The argument for these VR mods not running afoul of copyright law as it currently exists is that they’re more like an emulator that supports a significant number of games and don’t really modify the game itself at all. Obviously game companies tend to hate emulators too and have even tried to go after them so you probably can’t trust their judgement on this.

You could even draw parallels here to something like Google’s recently announced autospatialization feature of Android XR that will make it possible to play any game (in theory, in practice some games will probably work better than others) with 3D visuals. Google certainly isn’t offering that for free since it only works on an Android device that they get paid for because it is using their software.

There’s something to be said for this as well certainly but I do think the deck is still much better overall than will be required since they actually offer spare parts for sale for pretty much everything and repair guides too.