I think since Colt designed the M4 for the military, it would be a copyright name under their company. That's why the Canadian M4s aren't called M4s and neither are the English ones used by SAS

Game guns are made to different designs sometimes.
FPS games usually have to model them more thoroughly, but other games can get away with different stuff.
Max Payne 2, fr'instance has low detail models for the most part, but high detail textures I think they scanned in or something.

Looking back over that post it doesn't make much coherent sense. I've been awake for a long time now, probably should go to bed.

Yeah, but foreign countries have their own military designations, there's no reason to expect them to use ours. And Colt would have a patent on the design, but there's no reason to expect them to have a trademark on a name that they didn't come up with themselves, is there? (Do companies like Bushmaster or Stag Arms pay Colt a license fee for their M4s then?)

I think the name thing is about brand power.
Like you can make Coke if you could figure out the recipe. That's no prob.
But if you call it Coke so people will buy it, there's the obvious rub.

M4 was already determined to be a generic term for shorter ar-15, colt and bushmaster already had that argument.

...which is exactly why it would be almost impossible to copyright the shape of the M4, unlike H&Ks or Glocks. If I recall, the M4A1 was called the "Maverick M4A1" in the retail version of "Counter-Strike".

Wow, Glock actually got to copyright the shape of its pistols? It's so boxy and generic it's no wonder that the original Half-Life FPS game made it the standard sidearm there, since in those days they could get away with such a limited polygon budget and still make the pistol look realistic.

If I had more time I would have made this thread myself, because something about guns in video games greatly confuses me: just how much is the licensing fee to use the real names of guns? Anyone got a ballpark figure? Is it so high that only the best-financed companies can get real names for all their guns?

I'm also very confused as to why H&K didn't give its permission for something like SWAT 4. Isn't the HK MP5 one of the most iconic guns for Counter-Terrorist units like SWAT teams? Why wouldn't they want the MP5 to be associated with that game? Colt and Benelli agreed; why not H&K?

Wasn't there a UMP in that game?

That has nothing to do with copyrights, that's simply a matter of different designation preferences (the British MoD designates everything with "L" - i.e. L85 - rather than "M", as in the U.S. military). The M4s used by the SAS are not manufactured in British factories (as best I know, they use American-made weapons supplied by the U.S. government), so copyright issues are irrelevant.

Yes, there was an HK UMP, and an HK G36C, but all of them went under assumed names. Pretty weird given how much H&K is represented among the arsenals of counter-terrorist units.