AMAZON DROPS COMPANY POLICIES ON GAME DEVELOPMENT

Amazon.com Inc. withdrew a set of staff guidelines that claimed ownership rights to video games made by employees after work hours and dictated how they could distribute them, according to a company email reviewed by Bloomberg. The long-standing policies within Amazon Game Studios had drawn criticism on social media over the past month after a Google engineer posted about them. Some game developers described the rules as “draconian.” The old policies mandated that employees of the games division who were moonlighting on projects would need to use Amazon products and sell their games on Amazon digital stores. It also gave the company “a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferable license” to intellectual property rights of any games developed by its employees.