I’m currently in the planning process of creating the characters that will be playable in the upcoming racing game. Characters will be based on characters from top games that are in Roblox and their respective developers. However, I have this striking question that I thought of: Will I need to receive the consent from the original developer? Or can I put the logo of their game to acknowledge them?
I was thinking about this as this game will have the idea from super smash bros where characters from different games will come in one.
There is often a misconception that giving “credit” or acknowledgement somehow excuses copyright infringement. There are few very specific cases where license has been given on the condition of attribution, this is absolutely not the default and should not be assumed.
Assuming you mean characters as in creations that exist in their specific game, ask the developer to give you permission/license to use those characters/creations from their games.
If you’re going to use their Roblox avatar, instead of their creations, then you could use that without much issue.
I plan to use their avatars, not their creations. However, this is what concerns me: Will I be able to use characters that reference their games, for example, a cop and robber referring to JailBreak?
Creating your own cop and robber is fine, so long as you don’t directly copy someone else’s clothes.
Putting the name Jailbreak next to it is a bit sketchy and some games may have trademarked their name.
Using their logo would be copyright infringement, and if the logo itself is trademarked then you’d be breaking two laws at once.
In general, it is okay to take inspiration. To copy directly, you need permission or license of some sort. And look out for registered trademarks which will likely be the name and/or logo of the game.
Your best approach is to have a generic cop and robber, a generic soldier, a generic dragon, etc rather than having direct reference to those games.