Gaming & Esports

The world of online games holds a fascinating dynamic in which players from all over the world can explore virtual worlds and interact with each other. But behind the scenes of these digital realities, developers and publishers face a critical task: moderating player behavior and ensuring fairness in competition. Online games that rely on cooperation and competition face the challenge of maintaining a positive gaming environment and guarding against cheating and hacking. In this article we show how these problems can be addressed with the help of artificial intelligence and what needs to be considered in order to mitigate potential legal risks.

In video games, artificial intelligence (AI) has not been a foreign word for a long time. NPCs (non-player characters) and bots have always been described as AI. But the advances in the sphere of actually capable, generative AI, such as the proprietary tools for AI game development called NVIDIA Omniverse ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) announced by graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA the Computex 2023.

The integration of AI chats, like ChatGPT, in games will open up exciting new possibilities for the medium. Conceivable are evolutions of text-based genres, more in-depth stories and quests, and a much more immersive world for the players.

AI can be used to write dialogue, quests and item descriptions. In addition, it can generate art assets, game items and other objects. AI models will also greatly simplify the procedural generation of game worlds. The limits of the use of generative AI seem to depend solely on the imagination of the developers.

An Austrian court recently ruled that Sony must repay 338.26 EUR to a gamer. The Hermagor District Court (Bezirksgericht Hermagor) considered the FUT Packs that are available in the soccer simulation FIFA to be gambling under Austrian law. This case has reignited the debate surrounding the legal classification of loot boxes in the gaming industry.

In the legal dispute between Sony and Datel, the BGH referred two questions to the ECJ on 23. February 2023 for a preliminary ruling in order to clarify the legal situation of the permissibility of the distribution of cheat software under EU copyright law.

Last December, a report brought the gaming world further into the mainstream: The developer of the popular battle royale "Fortnite", Epic Games, and the US Federal Trade Commission reached a record-breaking settlement of USD 520 million (approx. EUR 473 million) in a legal dispute.