I saw many CoG games using actual brand, such as “Choice of Robots”. In book, GTA, Xbox, Mega Man and many more IRL brands used.
However, many HG games I’ve played is trying to avoid that. Is there some kind of rule for HG games that not allowing IRL brand name usage in books?
No, there isn’t a rule.
Thanks for clarifying that. I was thinking of using IRL brands in my book but this was bothering me.
To give a more general perspective outside of COG, there are rules governing the use of brand names in literature, but they’re extremely lax You’re allowed to reference real-world brands as much as you want (provided you aren’t slandering them or committing libel). The one restriction is that you can’t use the name outside of referring to the actual company. So, instead of saying, “She Googled the rune,” you’d have to say, “She searched for the rune on Google.”
This question is more on the legality realm and “not putting bad names to our brand.”
To give context, Ace Combat is a flight arcade combat game that uses real-life Sukhois, General Dynamics’s crafts, Gripen, Eurofighter’s, Boeing’s crafts, etc. By the nature of arcade combat, this means the dev can put bad stats on some crafts, and by extent, the brand of a certain company. Even the antagonist faction uses a lot of Russian-based crafts–shooting them down can promote a certain something idea. But this was never the focus; Ace Combat is about taking down 100 planes, low passes under a bridge, and flying through underground tunnels.
Project Wingman is an indie flight arcade game that uses, instead of true to real-life, fantasized IRL crafts. There’s a plane model that looks exactly like an SU-27, but in-game, the game refers to it as SK-27 as getting the license from Sukhoi costs money. As well as F-18 becomes E-18.