Gray area of MOD rights nearly ruined Red Alert Circle
Few games are as popular as Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, which was a huge hit at the time of its release and is still going strong 20 years later.
Enter the keyword “Red Alert” into any major streaming platform, and the millions of plays are a testament to the game’s popularity, and despite a certain amount of “sentimentality”, Red Alert has really made a comeback in the new era.
There are many reasons for the resurgence of Red Alert’s popularity, perhaps it is the promotion of video creators and anchors, or perhaps it is the perfect civil battle platform that provides a constant flow of gameplay power for players who are passionate about PVP, but in the long run, the key to Red Alert’s longevity is probably the quality of the mods that players have polished and perfected with their own dedication.
As an old game with excellent support for mods, the efforts of countless mod creators at home and abroad over the past 20 years have revitalized the Red Alert circle, and players can experience brand new maps and gameplay from time to time, and even in the early years, the popularity of the mod “Glory of the Republic” was able to surpass that of the original version, which has become the childhood memories of many players.
However, the seemingly bright and prosperous Red Alert MOD circle will eventually crack under various factors.
When we finally realized the importance of MOD rights in the gray area of the law, only to be surprised that the original community environment constructed with love, is so fragile.
Mind Over Matter is a topic that can’t be avoided
When it comes to Red Alert mods, Mind Over Matter is a topic that can’t be avoided. Since its release in 2005, the mod has continued to bring players a large number of original units, battle plots, new camps and other new content, after 18 years of iteration, the current “End of Mind” player recognition has been able to be on a par with the original version of “Yuri’s Revenge”, known as “almost perfect Yuri’s Revenge! “.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that “Mind Over Matter” is a private modding project, the operating costs of the multiplayer server used in the game rely on the production team’s love of power generation and the players’ love of the bounty to support. In addition, the domestic network environment is special, so the PVP server of “End of Mind” will have lagging and dropping problems every now and then, which seriously affects the players’ gaming experience.
Members of the production team also called for the construction of Chinese servers in the official forum.
As mentioned above, the popularity of Red Alert is closely related to the rise of PVP battle platforms. In the era when the Internet was not well developed, it was not easy for players to call their friends to play together, but today, fully-featured battle platforms can satisfy most of the needs of most players, and online battles have already become an indispensable part of Red Alert’s community.
As the saying goes, “online games don’t make people violent, network delays do”, in the multiplayer battles, domestic battle platforms set up servers are obviously more reliable than the overseas origin of the “Mind Over Matter”. July 21, the Red Alert circle well-known online battle platform “Rambo play battle platform On July 21st, the well-known Red Alert online battle platform “Rambo Play Battle Platform” came out and announced that it would integrate the “Mind Over Matter” MOD into its own platform, so that players don’t need to build servers by themselves and don’t have to worry about frequent dropouts and lags, they just need to click and download it on the platform, and then they can play it directly.
In addition, Rambo Games also promised in the update announcement that Mind Over Matter will not be used for profit, and if players are enthusiastic enough, it will invest more resources in the game in the future, such as installing the ladder function or organizing special matchmaking tournaments.
From an onlooker’s point of view, Ranbow Play’s approach is impeccable, simplifying the download and installation of mods and providing Chinese players with stable and reliable servers. But before that, Rambo Play deliberately covered up one of the most basic facts - they simply didn’t have the authorization from the production team of Mind Over Matter.
Originally developed by Polish gamer Speeder, the team has gradually expanded in subsequent updates, and now has more than ten members in the production team. Although the copyright of mods has always been a difficult issue, but “End of Mind” contains a lot of original art materials and scene modeling, and from the point of view of EA’s operation strategy in recent years, the official players have an open and positive attitude towards the self-made mods, “End of Mind” in the sense of reasoning should be duly respected.
The original game codes of Command & Conquer and Red Alert have been open-sourced on GitHub to help players make mods.
According to the official statement of Rambo Games, they did notify the production team of Mind Over Matter in advance, but the latter did not make any response, and Rambo Games was emboldened to put Mind Over Matter on the market without permission, and I am afraid that this operation is a sign of “silence” as “silent permission”. I’m afraid this is a case of “silence” being taken as “tacit approval”.
The fact that player-made mods are not taken seriously is not news to Red Alert.
As early as “Mind End” before the shelves, Rambo Play has already appeared in front of Red Alert mod players as a negative teaching material. Earlier this year, a group of players led by B station UP master “Aimu Kui” denounced Rambo Play’s platform for belittling MOD copyrights, letting go of the phenomenon of art material piracy, etc., and even launched the map in-purchase payment mechanism, seriously damaging the mod community! They even introduced a payment mechanism for in-map purchases, which seriously undermined the principle and atmosphere of mutual benefit, mutual assistance, and openness in the modding community.
Rambo Play had previously put its name on the Red Alert 2 production staff list.
For this reason, on June 30th, Lamborghini published an announcement called “Respect and protect original intellectual property rights”, pointing out the bad behavior of stealing pictures and materials in the Red Alert circle, and expressing its willingness to assist the original creators in defending their rights and jointly promoting the innovative development of Red Alert. However, less than a month later, this announcement seems to have lost its effectiveness.
Shortly after Mind Over Matter hit Rambo Play’s platforms, players picked up a lot of bootlegs through repeated comparisons, such as modifying the in-game billboards originally used to advertise CNCNET, the officially designated online platform, into Rambo Play’s own advertisements:
Others, after exhaustive comparative testing, confirmed Rambo Play’s file tampering with the Mind Over Matter mod, including but not limited to altering encounter loading maps, tweaking game values, and more.
Replacing billboards may be seen as a commercial consideration, but privately modifying game files seems like a thankless and useless endeavor.
The prevailing view among players is that by modifying the files, they have thus realized an exclusive version of Mind Over Matter for the Rambo Play platform, and even if players choose to delete the platform one day and use other platforms to play against each other, they will still encounter the problem of incompatible files and thus not be able to open the game properly.
Interestingly, in the process, some players submitted relevant information to the well-known antivirus software, Fire Down, and Fire Down officials have basically confirmed Rambo Play’s unauthorized tampering with local files.
The evidence was overwhelming, there was no way to defend themselves, and at this point, Rambo Play seemed to have lost the motivation to prove themselves, and a week later, Rambo Play took the initiative to pull down Mind Over Matter and offered their killer app, “Due to the existence of bad value orientation as well as the suspicion of discrediting the country’s image, we decided to take down the Mind Over Matter mod.”
The Red Alert franchise’s flirtations with and spoofs of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp are objective, but that doesn’t mean that Mind Over Matter has to take the blame.
According to incomplete statistics, more than half of the members of the current “Mind Over Matter” production team for the Chinese, the MOD is also in China by countless fans of the series of love and pursuit, thousands of players have personally examined all kinds of content in the game, Rambo play this operation more or less “their own shortcomings but also to the teacher to play the report” meaning.
In any case, the basic demand of the players to force Rambo to take down Mind Over Matter has been successfully achieved, at least in terms of the result, we have achieved a stage victory - but this hard-won victory is really only a “stage”.
Rambo took down Mind Over Matter
At the same time that Rambo took down Mind Over Matter, several Red Alert gamers collectively reported that they had been boxed out of the game, and were bombarded with text messages and phone calls throughout the day;
At the same time, CNCNET, the only designated official online platform for Mind Over Matter, suffered a DDoS attack from an unknown source, with a large number of players reporting that the servers they normally use went on hiatus for a whole day, which is clearly not a server pumping phenomenon that occurs in the daily life of the CNCNET platform.
We don’t know if this mess was related to the Mind Over Matters incident, but a week later, Bamboo Dragonfly, a well-known modder in the Red Alert community, posted a message in the forums claiming that he had received a large number of harassing phone calls and threatening text messages, and announced that he was retiring from the game, and would not want to have anything to do with Red Alert in the future.
As for the production team of “Mind Over Matter”, which is in the center of public opinion, they have also decided to temporarily postpone the development of the subsequent version. No matter how you look at it, the innocent Red Alert players have lost again and again, and they have simply lost their minds.
The Mind Over Matter incident is just a microcosm of the Red Alert mod scene, and in a world where people suck more than each other, what happened to Mind Over Matter isn’t an isolated case, and it’s obviously not the worst one.
There are countless small, obscure mods that are huddled under the protection of platforms while being subjected to what is known as “intellectual property protection”, and even if there were no Rambo, there are still other platforms that have been the main protagonists of such incidents, such as Red Alert 2, another well-known online battling platform in the Red Alert community, and Battle.net Battle.net. Battle.net Battle Platform.
Battle.net has also released mods without the authorization of the Mind Over Matter team.
According to EA’s attitude towards Red Alert mods, as long as they don’t constitute a profit, they are more than welcome to create all kinds of mods for Red Alert.
However, the reality is that online platforms use mods to guide users to consume, and illegal behaviors such as stealing pictures and materials are endless, even Rambo, which has repeatedly provoked the anger of players, only shelves the mods without any substantial losses.
Rambo Play changed its name to Rambo Matchmaking Platform in June this year and operated as usual.
The revival of Red Alert after 20 years of existence is inseparable from the love of players for decades, which is both great and powerless. In the lack of official operation and maintenance of China’s Red Alert circle, there are a lot of problems related to MOD copyright disputes, and very few legal means to protect their rights, and it seems that this environment will continue for a long, long time.
