Some people (OP included) seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the concepts behind publication (the principle way it is done is the same across pretty much all industries).

It is the buying and selling of publication rights (which is the right to distribute in any fashion) to a specific work. Basically, creators and IP owners hold all rights by default. They then sell these in part or in whole (or "license" them).

There are four basic rights: first serial, second serial, one time, and all. First serial gives the publisher the rights to publish first, second serial gives the rights to publish the next wave, and one time is the most basic where the publisher just gets the right to be a publisher of the work once. These are writer's terms, but the principles are the exact same. All is just what it sasy: all. As in everything. Every right. Selling all means that the publisher has full control over the work in question and you cannot license it to anyone ever again.

Now, with Bayonetta 2, judging from Kamiya's statements, Nintendo owns all rights. In other words, in the contract that they negotiated with Nintendo, Nintendo was given all rights in exchange for funding. Which means Bayonetta 2 is for all intents and purposes THEIR game. It doesn't matter that Sega owns the larger Bayonetta 2 trademark and general IP, the specific Bayonetta 2 property is under Nintendo's exclusive control.

Lastly, publication - like all other business concerning copyright and creative works - always deals in the intellectual property not the physical or digital property. In other words, what matters is the sum of the parts, not the parts. In other words, the OP's suggestion would not work. Even if you recreated from scratch all the assets as new models and rewrote the code to look completely different while accomplishing the same thing and got new voice actors it would make zero difference. Because the sum of those parts is still the same intellectual property, Bayonetta 2, which Nintendo holds all rights over. In order for them to get around Nintendo's rights, every aspect of the game would have to be sufficiently different enough to constitute a new creation including appearance, presentation, story, and script.

For example, if I wrote a short story and accidentally sold all rights to a magazine, I cannot just take that story and change my adjectives and rename it and then publish it somewhere else. Because while I changed the words on the page, the sum of them is still the same; it's the same story with minor edits. While I can reuse things like basic plot and the like, the work must be sufficiently differentiated from the one I sold the rights to in order for it to be considered a separate property.

So, assuming (and it is very safe to assume) that Nintendo holds all publication rights over Bayonetta 2 specifically, Bayonetta 2 is a Nintendo exclusive until Nintendo says otherwise, end of story.

Love the opening post.

So by his logic, i could take the Lord of the Rings books, remove a period on one of the sentences and then re-release it. Or change one characters, name, ect.

Sorry but that's not how stuff works.

god i hope they dont waste their time even considering releasing it for another system and instead work on a new game.

Well there is plenty of stupidity spewed by gamers, but yeah thats just petulance.

I made that post quite a while ago... about 2 years ago, really. lol

MohammadBadir said:

This picture is SOOOOO accurate. 

Op you sir are a moron, fact is Nintendo paid for it, so if Sega try to screw them over they will get sued so bad that will be the end of Sega. In fairness this is the worst argument ever construed.

User was moderated for this post - Conegamer

You should have gone to bed :p