Protecting Intellectual Property

There are four ways one can protect the intellectual property (I will refer to as IP) of their company. The first way is to copyright your work. Essentially, it makes it so something cannot be used outside of the consent of its creator. With my company in mind, copyrights will be important to have since the I will need to copyright all possible creative works that is put into the game.

The next way to protect your IPs is through trade secrets. Trade secrets can be various things from a secret formula or a special technique that is not widely know to the public. An example of something that could have been a trade secret would be the drop shadow in 3D video games. It was first used by Nintendo in its first 3D Mario game. At first, people were struggling to gauge where Mario would land when they jump. In comes the drop shadow. The drop shadow is just a small shadow underneath the character. In the 3D Mario game, it allowed players to correctly estimate where they will jump.

This is not widely known to the public, but it is well known among game developers and designers. The drop shadow example is probably not a trade secret, but it is still something useful for anyone creating 3D games or simulations. Another thing about trade secrets is it is a good idea not to tell anyone about your own trade secrets.

The third way to protect your IP is to patent it. However, there is a strict guidelines on what can or cannot be patented. To overgeneralize this, to patent something, it should be unique. Sadly, I have not created anything that can be patented.

The final way to protect your IP is to trademark it. Trademarks are used to protect your brand or your company's identity. Something I would trademark for my company would be my company's name and its logo. It would be troublesome if someone else created a game development company under the same name or with a similar logo.                                       

The Elevator Pitch

An elevator pitch is defined as an introduction to yourself and your company in the span of 30 or so seconds. The elevator pitch should consist of your company name, what your company does, and the value of your company. Currently, my start-up company, Star Tail Studios is just a plan on paper. But what I can do to create an elevator pitch for my company is to imagine it through different stages.

Let us say my company started up and was able to create a decent game that is published on Steam with a couple purchases. Starting from that, I will make my elevator pitch from there.

Now let us imagine a situation where someone asks me about myself and my company. This is what I would say for my elevator pitch.

"Hello, I'm Peter Nguyen of Star Tail Studios. Me and my development team just shipped a game out on Steam a couple weeks ago. It received positive feedback and I hope the players enjoyed the story as much as our team at Star Tail enjoyed creating it."

To break down this pitch, I introduced myself and the name of my company. I told the person what we are by telling them what we shipped. I gave a sense of value by talking about positive reviews. I also introduced a snippet of our mission statement by talking about hoping the player enjoys our stories and showing the company's environment as well.