In March, Brandon J. Huffman joined the IGDA Student Special Interest Group (SIG) for an Ask Me Anything (AMA). An AMA is a format for hosting online discussions where the audience asks questions of the guest speaker during a set amount of time. The IGDA hosts AMAs on their community Discord server.
During the discussion, Brandon talked with several students seeking to enter the video game industry on topics and questions like:
- What are the most common avoidable mistakes are that developers make when they first start out. and what are some mistakes they make when they start working for a different company?
- What are the main questions you should ask when negotiating employment with a video game company?
- What kind of a case do games have when a game is released with similar mechanics?
- What sort of differences are there between traditional media law and video game law?
- How do you see video game law as changing over the next decade? What legal issues are going to be bigger in the future?
During the last question, Brandon identified three main trends he sees as changing over the next decade in video game law – privacy, AR/VR issues and blockchain technology.
Privacy is definitely more on US regulators radar than ever before. Europe is already jumping ahead with GDPR – with Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, privacy issues and more concerns about data privacy, this will be more on regulator’s radar. There will be more of a video game privacy industry than there is now.
There is also the upcoming matter of loot box regulation. “It’s a question of where it happens first but it’s going to happen,” said Brandon. “We already have regulations on gambling that may or may not be being violated by loot boxes in their present form but we’ll see regulators be more explicit going forward.”
