On Sunday, the extremely popular, free-to-use wargame army building app New Recruit announced that “due to legal reasons, official rules texts for certain games are no longer displayed on New Recruit”. It hasn’t specified what those legal reasons are, or listed all the games that are affected, but the original wording of all the Warhammer 40,000 rules in the app have been replaced with supermarket own-brand replacements.
New Recruit announced the changes on its website, stating the team is now “publishing our own description of how each rule works for most current games”, and “older games will follow the same process”. Until the process is completed, “you may see empty descriptions or [text removed]”, and foreign language translations have also gone.
This is going to be an issue for the Warhammer 40k community, and possibly for other affected games. Unlike many modern wargames, accessing the full rules text for Warhammer 40,000 requires customers pay for Codex army books – a player who wants to browse the entire library of Warhammer 40k factions, whether because they want to pick a new army or they’re preparing for a tournament, needs to spend over $1,000 to do so officially. Due to the new edition cycle, that investment lasts three years max. Many players choose to use New Recruit, or various other unofficial services, instead.
Warhammer 40k rules are sufficiently complex that arguments over interpretation are already common (though the modern game is blessedly well explained compared to how it has been in the past). Periodic rules changes from Games Workshop, and occasional unannounced alterations to rules text in the Warhammer app, create further misunderstandings, as the most locked-in players pick up on changes before their more casual peers. Now large portions of the player base are going to be rules text that is simply different.
It strikes me as one more good reason for Games Workshop to make more of its rules available for free. It’s understandable that cost-conscious players turn to free, unofficial apps when the official one is so incomplete without spending silly money. This divides the player base, diluting the shared understanding of the rules, and creating friction.
Unofficial apps are legally permissible, at least in some forms, because of the unintuitive copyright status of game rules. The UK and US copyright regimes treats game rules in the same ways as instructions and recipes. The written text has a copyright, but the abstract process that the written text describes does not. If you’ve ever wondered why online recipes are so full of superfluous descriptions, this is one reason – it’s to make the text less abstract and more creative, and therefore copyright protected.
Directly copying rules text into a new document is a breach of copyright, as is tweaking that text with a few changes (this is called a ‘derivative work’). Yet the logical core of a set of rules has no protection. Sufficiently distinctive unofficial rules apps can therefore operate legally, assuming they don’t tread on any other IP protections.
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Source: Wargamer
