Say I was to want to write something around a Fallout 4 setting. Bunker and whatnot. But my content wouldn’t match the games content. Would I have to write out “this is a Fallout 4 inspired game”?
P.s. the Fallout 4 thing was a placeholder. I know “bunker in an apocalyptic setting” wouldnt call for alarm to the Fallout 4 creators)
You couldnt make money off of it. So its probably best to make it different enough that you wouldnt have to say amything.
So even saying “inspired by” makes it so you cant make money?
I think if it’s “loosely inspired”, there’s no problem; bunker in “apocalyptic setting” leaves a lot of room for you to write another game, with different places, characters, missions/objectives, creatures, etc. As long as you don’t try to directly set the story in the Fallout 4 universe, it’s fine. Plenty of things have been inspired by others.
It’s like with Harry Potter; you can’t write in that world because it’s J. K. Rowling’s property, but if you wanted to do a game set in a magical academy (that’s not Hogwarts), you could.
Depends what you mean by inspired by
I don’t really know a whole lot about the Fallout 4 universe, I’m just taking this from what I’ve seen of it on tumblr and twitter. If you, for example, take a bunch of elements from it that are iconic to that universe and/or play crucial parts in the plot, and they’re all virtually the same except for the names, or if you used different elements but had basically the same plot, that would definitely raise some eyebrows at least
If you do the whole bunker and a post-apocalyptic world, that would be totally fine since Fallout 4 didn’t invent and copyright post-apocalyptic bunkers. You can use the concept people being mutated from radiation, for example, in it and that would be fine as long as you’re not copying your source material/inspiration material (?). You could easily take inspirations from things like that and rework it to put your own original spin on it
Among many themes I like apocalypse themed things. When I announced my first game 90% of the people said it’s surely fallout 4 inspired. When it was out and obviously wasn’t, people assumed other games I haven’t played before, but turned out there really were similarities.
I think it’s fine to get inspired by something, as long as its content is different from the inspirational source. You’ll bump into speculations every now and then. There are so many creations and known, liked “cliches” out there it’s nearly impossible to not have a moment or two where it’s similar to XY game,movie, or book. Write what you want, be unique, let people test it, they’ll give you feedback. @Lycoris defined it pretty well.
That’s just my opinion, I can be wrong though. 