Ryuu96 said:
Yes. The Tolkien Estate sold the rights to The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit a long time ago to The Saul Zaentz Company and now Embracer has those rights, so, Embracer basically owns the characters created specifically for those books and they can tell whatever stories they want for that time period using those characters. Stories in the 2nd age remain with The Tolkien Estate, such as The Silmarillion, Amazon has a license to tell stories for the 2nd age and Embracer won't be able to touch that era without a license of their own but anything from the 3rd age is now Embracer's to do with what they like, Amazon also can't touch stuff specific to The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit without permission from Embracer nor can they tell stories in that time period. That's my limited understanding of the matter from looking into it in the past, these rights are a bit all over the place. So these games such as Shadow of War/Mordor and that upcoming Gollum game had to gain permission from Saul Zaentz, not the Tolkien Estate, now they need to gain permission from Embracer. |
AFAIK Amazon didn't have access to Silmarillion/Unfinished Tales (which is mostly first-age stuff, hence they going for second-age material from the LOTR appendices), but the Zaentz Co. does. So that's a mega win for Embracer there.
Were Amazon, Sony, Disney, asleep at the wheel, since we know the deal was rather cheap?
