EA Sports’ upcoming fighter EA Sports UFC will let you create your own custom fighters, but, rather bafflingly, it will not lt you share them. This decision, EA Sports has explained, is because of concerns about copyright and intellectual property ownership.
“Nowadays, when people can make YouTube clips and share them, there’s this whole gray area where if our game allows users to make a Rocky character that’s the intellectual property of somebody else, it causes a ton of problems,” said creative director Brian Hayes, while noting that the developers at EA Canada “loved” the feature. “There is a Create-A-Fighter, and you could create you own [sic] Rocky, but when we are facilitating the sharing of content, it gets very difficult.”
The issue arose from the last game, EA Sports MMA, having a Fighter Share function, which was all well and good… until people started uploading fighters based on Harry Potter, Rocky Balboa, and so on, which got EA into all sorts of legal trouble.
So guys… stupid copyright and ownership laws are why we cannot have nice things, in case you were wondering.