Stardocks CEO believes all Pirates are thieves, even though they practically help him. I (not-so kindly) disagree.
This is basically what the latest post from Stardock’s CEO comes down to when he says the following:
But…but…what about those hundreds of thousands of pirates? Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you’re playing a pirated copy right now, if you’re one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you’re a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way.
Emphasis mine.
So what exactly is pissing Frogboy off? That Piracy helped make his game stunningly famous even before it hit the stores? That file-sharing did free advertisement for Demigod to the scale that it catapulted it to the 3rd place in sales (possibly higher if you count online sales). That Pirates urged each other to actually support Stardock if they can, to promote this kind of initiative?
Frogboy should be on his fucking knees praising Pirates at this point for all the free publicity they gave the title, not simply by the fact that they gave the game to each other to try before it officially hit the stores, but also for the controversy this raised on popular news sources which brought further spotlight to the game.
And this is, in short, the reply: “Fuck you, you’re goddamn thieves!You piss me off!”
So how exactly are pirates thieves Frogboy? Do you subscribe that every downloaded copy is a lost sale? Do you not consider for a second that the people downloading games maybe can’t afford them (so they wouldn’t buy it anyway) but they still do free word-of-mouth publicity for you? Do you consider that perhaps for others the quality of the game does not validate the price but they may still buy it just because they are pirates?
I used to think that Stardock was enlightened enough to figure out that file-sharing is caring, that pirates are, as gamers, on their side. But this latest post makes me reconsider. I’ve become a big supporter of Stardock just because of what (I assumed) their take on Piracy was and as a result I’ve bought every game I wanted to play from them. I will reconsider that as well.
The innovative physics game World of Goo was finally released for GNU/Linux and it managed to outsell the previous best selling day, via the developer’s website by 40%!
Update 4: It’s only been 2 days since the release of the Linux version and it already accounts for 4.6% of the full downloads from our website. Our thanks to everyone who’s playing the game on Linux and spreading the word. Here are a couple of nifty stats:
About 12% of Linux downloads are of the .rpm package, 30% are of the .tar.gz package, and 57% are of the .deb package.
More copies of the game were sold via our website on the day the Linux version released than any other day. This day beat the previous record by 40%. There is a market for Linux games after all 🙂
(Emphasis mine)
This is the kind of update that deserves its own blogpost just to make this heard. It is excellent news and I believe sends out quite a strong message to anyone who is paying attention.
As it’s difficult to repost the same URL to social news sites, I’m making this new post just to raise attention to this factoid.
I’m quite excited to see how much of the total pie the GNU/Linux versions will grab. We have already passed an amazing threshold where 1% of the OS market (or so we’re told) has managed to buy the game almost 5 times as much. Here’s to reaching 10% and beyond.
It’s been a classic argument in the GNU/Linux VS Windows debates that people don’t switch to the former because there are no games for it. And there are no games for GNU/Linux because developers don’t think there’s a market for it to justify the cost. And there’s no market to justify the cost because gamers don’t switch to it.
It’s a vicious cycle from which it’s extremely difficult to get out of. To do that, it would need one side to do the first step. Either gamers need to switch and start being vocal on wanting their games native for their OS (ie platform agnostic) or game developers need to show good faith and port or code their games for it from the get go and then see that the effort was worth it.
Well, To my delight, It seems that some developers did decide to attempt the later. The lately popular World of Goohas finally been ported to GNU/Linux. This is exciting news and the kind of thing that gamers on linux need to show support for if we want to provide incentive for this kind of thing to continue. The developers at the moment are curious about the results of this move and I’d like to think we won’t disappoint.
To tell the truth I haven’t played the game but I certainly have heard a lot about it. It seems to involve very innovative gameplay and I was tempted to purchase it through steam. One thing stopped me of course, which was the fact that I would have to boot my whole computer if I wanted to enjoy it.
This is, incidentally, something that happens quite often and affects my game purchase decisions. I’ve ended up only purchasing:
Games that are very cheap and I don’t feel like wasting a lot of money If I don’t play them until the next time I happen to boot into windows
Games that I really, really, really want to play. The ones that I’ve known for months that I would be playing when they came out. Needless to say those are few and far between.
Games that run natively on my OS of choice. It goes without saying that I do not get much of those but when I do, I don’t lose the chance to purchase them and thus have something to do play when bored without the annoying reboot. Case in point: I’ve already bough both the On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness episodes and I will continue buying them in the future, because they are fun, cheap and most importantly, play natively.
The one thing that annoys me even more on this issue is how much resistance windows users display on this. It’s as if when game companies have a platform agnostic code then they are afraid that the performance on windows will drop. I honestly don’t know where this hostility comes from but it generally translates into mouthfuls of FUD and negativity on any kind of suggestion.
Incidentally very recently I had just such a discussion in a Demigod forum thread (one of the games that I really really want to play). The discussion started simply on the fact that Steam is and the Source engine are probably going to be ported to GNU/Linux and an appeal to Stardock ((One of the most progressive publishers and one that I believe can be more positive to this idea)) and Impulse to do the same. There were a lot of good suggestions and arguments on both sides and the very positive thing that Stardock devs actually took part and put forth their thoughts. For example:
As a part-time linux user myself, I’ve come to accept the fact that linux is not destined to be a gaming OS. Until either developers abandon DirectX, or someone figures out a 100% painless DX port for linux, you won’t see a big move on linux games. Why? Because transitioning from a DX based engine to an OGL one is not in the least bit trivial. iD can do it because I believe their games are done in OpenGL to begin with, so getting it to run on Linux is a much simpler task for them (by comparison). UnrealEngine is built for both DX and OGL.
To get developers porting games to linux, there has to be a guarantee on the return on investment. If it takes 1 full time developer a year to port some game, then that game has to at least sell enough copies to cover the cost. To make it actually worth the time though it would have to make a lot more money than the cost to develop, otherwise it’s a better value to have that developer work on the Windows version which is a better financial bet.
The platform needs a few big-name champions to make it viable, but in a market where a big-name game can cost in the millions of dollars to develop, that’s a risk not many companies are generally willing to take.
In the end of course, Stardock wasn’t convinced. I was nevertheless surprised at the amount of negativity displayed by simple users, occasionaly without any obvious reasoning other than that they didn’t like GNU/Linux.
One of my main arguments in this thread was that the GNU/Linux gaming market is severely under-estimated at every turn. I truly believe that there are enough of us who not only are gamers but are willing to support those who extend a hand. And now is the time to put our money where our mouths are. Purchasing the World of Goo in non-trivial number will not only show its developers that it’s worth coding their future games for our OS as well, but it will certainly turn the heads of other publishers if they smell that there is a potential market once the WoG guys speak about the (hopefully positive) results.
To get Games for Linux (no TM yet) we need to reach a tipping point, either on the side of Gamers which will convince the Publishers that there is a market, or on the side of Publishers which will allow enough gamers to try the OS out without much gaming withdrawal. Lets hope that the results for the WoG experiment will be another small push towards that point.
Now go and read what Helios has to say about this. You also get a nice interview with the developers about the challenges they faced on the port (technical or not), as well as a little bonus offer 😉
Time to leave aside all the heavy socioeconomic and philosophical stuff and play some video games. I’m in the Demigod beta and Sins of a Solar empire is quite cool as well.
I’ve toned down my blogging lately because my interest in gaming has been rekindled. As some may know already, I was a huge gaming enthusiast in my earlier days and now and then, the urge takes me once more and I dive into it for a short while.
This time my interest of choice has been Demigod, a upcoming RTS/RPG hybrid following on the succesful footsteps of DotA, which is quite a smart move as they get to milk an untapped market for this type of gameplay which has an already proven popularity. In Greece for example, the DotA popularity in Netcafes is immense. Day in and day out, people will tune in for this game and Counterstrike, both of which, incidentally seem to be more popular than their original game types (Warcraft 3 and Half-Life respectively).
[youtube]0vd8an0P5LI[/youtube]
I always wanted to play DotA but I didn’t have a copy of Warcraft3 available and I couldn’t be bothered to buy one just for it, so it was a nice solution that Gas Powered Games came out with a commercially developed game of this type since they also created another one of my recent favourites, Supreme Commander.
The good thing is that I could go in and join the beta simply by pre-ordering the game. This is a unique take on beta testing, which I think has a lot of potential, which is to allow everyone to join in simply by promising to buy the game. That way, you don’t have to rely on random selection and you insure that satisfaction is granted to those most excited about it.
So I’ve been playing the beta recently and I like what I see, although it still has a way to go before it is balanced and keeps up the interest for more than 20 games. From what I hear the beta testers don’t really see the whole enchelada so we probably see the the worrying trends resolved in the full version. Unfortunately we’re all eagerly awaiting the much advertised patch to fix the huge network issues that mutliplayer suffers from currently which make online play an annoyance more than anything else. After playing mostly against the AI for 1.5 week, I decided to wait until the patch comes out until I attempt any more MP.
So, as I was browing what Impulse had to offer, I noticed another game called Sins of a Solar Empire which seemed interesting although the screenshots didn’t really amaze me. Nevertheless I kept hearing positive things about it so I decided togive the demo a try.
[youtube]e2Pv7TtV8js[/youtube]
I was hooked pretty quickly from it and as soon as my playtime expired in the demo, I bought the game through Impulse to continue. I won’t go much into details as you can easily find much more complete reviews of it if you’re interested but I’ll say that if you’re a fan of both RTS games and 4X games (Masters of Orion series, Galactic Civilizations etc) then this is certainly going to appeal to you as it merges aspects from both giving it an epic scale for an RTS and a fast-pace for a 4X.
What I didn’t like about it is the lack of a campaign mode, which although something standard for 4X games, is something always available for RTS’. I will try to work around it by playing on huge maps with lots of player but unfortunately this makes it a bit lacking as you only have the choice of 3 differents races to choose from and all of them have basically the same unit types (the only difference is that they get them at different points of the research tree). This makes the whole thing look a bit bland as you’re mostly playing a rock-paper-scissors game with your fleet compositions, since each ship type is basically designed to deal explicitly with another ship type.
On the other hand, they’ve done a wonderful job of merging RPG aspects into the game as well, where your capital ships are absolutely impossing and capable of earning experience and levels, giving them more special abilities and the like. In effect, the Capital ships play the role of Heroes in Warcraft 3.
Unfortunately the graphics are not as good as I would like, but I think that may be because Hegemonia spoiled me
[youtube]JBPChUimXvQ[/youtube]
As it is now, I’m going to start playing with a huge map and try to act as if that is a campaign. There are expansions coming out (I already bought it with the first one) and eventually a campaign is going to be included in the first major expansion. Lets hope my interest is held until then.
In the last two days I’ve been playing Spore which I have, lets say, borrowed from a friend and I must say I quite like it. It’s a pretty addictive game and all pseudo-evolution, make your own monster stuff is cute.
But I’m not going to buy it.
Why? Because the publisher has seriously dropped the ball in regards to what the consumer wants. I was honestly considering bying the game today but then I stumbled onto the reviews of it on Amazon and realised what kind of C.R.A.P. they have in store for me. I will not buy a product who treats me as if I’m a thief already. I will not buy a product which is liable to stop working after I reinstall my machine a few times (and as a techie, this is not that rare). I will not buy a procuct which may stop accepting my activation after a few years. I will not buy a product which uses a copy-protection both known to be disruptive to your machine and taxing on your hardware.
Unless this DRM shit is removed, I am not buying the game. And it seems that most people agree with me on this.
Other than that, there are a few other things that are wrong with the game.
1) Evolution is very misrepresented.
While I understand that the game is mostly meant to be fun, there’s certainly ways you could have made it a bit more realistic. For example, I don’t mind that your creature seems to be growing in real time (especially since in the history view, this is shown as millions of years) but what I didn’t like was that your actions do not affect your evolution at all, other than the generic disposition you have (social vs aggressive, carnivore vs herbivore etc).
However, you actual creature traits have nothing to do with what actions you take. I can start as a carnivore but at any point I can switch to herbivore. I can have 4 spikes and suddenly have 1 big poison gland. I can have 8 limbs and a long body and the next generation can be a little ball with wings.
If nothing more, this seems like the creationist view of evolution where they expect a dog to give birth to a chicken or something similar, as this is exactly how it’s represented in the game. You gather DNA by doing stuff and then you mate and get to redesign your creature. At the this stage, you can pretty much make a totally new thing if you want to.
UPDATE: I think this review adequately explains everything that is wrong with the way evolution is repressented in the game.
2) Some things seem purely cosmetic.
I designed a creature with six legs which was as fast as a creature with one leg. This is because the only thing that matters is what kind of “foot” you have. You can have 10 legs if you want to but it actually hurts you. The only thing that matters is your best type of each limb. Your best hand, your best feet, etc. Multiple eyes don’t make any difference. More than 4 legs or hands are a disadvantage etc.
This is because bonuses don’t stack. You only ever use your best bonus from a specific part. So if you have one set of feet that gives 2 speed, and another that gives 3. Your overall is not 5 but 3. What this means is that there’s no point in getting more than 2 of any item as their bonuses overlap. So some feet give extra speed but less charge, some give jump and some give dance but they all overlap eventually.
There’s also no point in getting the same types of limbs for cosmetic reasons. If I have 3 sets of arms, it is a disadvantage to get all of them as human hands as I will not be getting any extra bonuses.
As a result, your creature ends up as a patchwork of limbs that just give the best bonuses and have no relation to possibly evolve (see part 1 as well).
I don’t really understand why they did this as it would have been very easy to simply allow the stacking of these bonuses. Then there would be a reason to have similar parts. If they also threw in a penalty for switching types (say a penalty from switching from a mouth to a beak) then it would make a bit more sense.
Another thing that bugs me about cosmetic stuff is that all the parts your acquire in the first two stages become irrelevant in the rest. It makes no difference in your abilities if you have 2,3,5 or 6 arms, legs, eyes or whatever. It would be nice if the way each creature was finalized (at the end of stage 2) played some role in the rest of the game.
3) The Creature Stage is too short
By far the creature stage (the 2nd one) is the most interesting as you get to play around with your critter body and limbs and the like. Unfortunately you barely begin to enjoy it when it ends and while you can continue playing in order to gather DNA and the like, there’s no point (unless there is some hidden award in place which I do not know but I imagine there is)
All your body changes (other than speed) become purely cosmetic for subsequent stages of the game.
It would be great if on hard difficulty the DNA rewards were much slower and one had the chance to play around a bit more, get to fight some of the big monsters etc. As it is, I had barely finished migrating one time when I was done and from a previous experience, I knew there was no point in gathering more DNA.
4) Civilization stage is boring
The fourth stage of the game is the Civilization stage which for me was very boring and repetitive. I won’t go much into details in this but basically combat is not really exciting and diplomacy does not exist. It’s best if one just does as much as possible to get past it quickly.
5) It’s not very hard
As an experienced gamer, I found medium difficulty to be very easy and the hard difficulty is barely challenging. If you’re going to make it that easy on hard, at least give us hardcore gamers an “impossible” setting or soemthing so that we can have a bit of fun.
6) No multiplayer
While the game is touted as a massive single-player game, it would be great if they had though of some way to have player interraction. As much fun as it look to be able to trade creatures and buildings with others, the novelty of that will last all of one week. Still, the galactic game seems interesting even though I haven’t managed to play it a lot. However my initial impression is that it might get boring very quickly if it isn’t expanded and the only way this can work is either with user created content or regular updates from the company (like a MMORPG) in the form or new missions, new types of single player experience etc.
Still, for all these things, the game is seriously fun and addictive. I can’t see me playing for too long but I’ve enjoyed it for the last two days. It’s quite fun to make your little critter be as weird as possible and slowly evolve it (realistically) and I’m going to go back and try to make more weird types later on, just for fun.
The creature creator is the best part of the game, as never before have we had so much freedom and fun in creating a new 3D object. What before would take hours of 3D modelling, can now happen in the span of a few minutes.
I truly believe most people will enjoy Spore, even with all its problems but I also believe that it’s not worth bying. Not with horrible DRM restrictions and not with such a low replayability. And if you think I’m being too negative, just check what is going on in the Spore Feedback fora. Perhaps this screenshot will give you some perspective.
Which of the two threads do you think is more popular?
For those not in the know, Penny Arcade is one of the oldest web comics on the net (It started back in ’98) and, as most webcomics those days, is about gaming. It has evolved quite an elaborate kind of humor as well as some unique characters and it also does not shy away from profanity. In short, I like it.
Which is why I was pleasantly surprised that a new game has just been released online, that is based on this setting and follows the same kind of rules: On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness.
The game is a CRPG with a Final Fantasy-esque combat system and with beautiful hand-drawn cartoonish graphics. It is novel in the sense that it is set in a weird 1920’s era and the two main heroes are versions of Gabe and Tycho from the original cartoon, as well the custom character you create for your use.
The storyline, as far as I have played it at least, seems interesting enough. Although the game, other than the narrator, does not include any speech, the dialogues are well made and, as expected, do not shy from profanity either. A welcome change for someone who is sick and tired of self-censoring games (like me)
As far as I’ve read, the game lasts around 5-10 hours but seeing as it’s the first episode, and you pay just €12 for it ($20) it does not seem a bad deal (at least for europeans).
And for the best part: It runs on GNU/Linux…natively! 😯
This was actually what made me decide to buy the game. Even though the game is still propriertary, the fact that they did not take the easy way and just use DirectX grants them my support and with the price like that, it was a pretty low token. Of course I do believe that for such a small and episodic game they might as well sell it for 5€ and double their buyers overnight. It will just not worth pirating it when you can get it online much easier.
In the end, I also think that they could just as well liberate the engine of the game and still suffer no problem. After all, the whole point of it is the artwork, music and story which are things you can keep under copyright control. However releasing the engine would make sense, as it would allow a much faster development and bug fixing process and plus, a whole lot of Positive Karma and support from the Free Software community.
And with that, this little review-of-sorts is finished and I leave you with a short trailer. If you like what you hear and see, head over to the seller and get it. Tell ’em I sent you 😛
Fellow Atheist, did you recently notice a sudden flux of visitors from blog posts that are not seemingly linking to you? Is so, this is because I’ve been playing around with a new online game and I’ve chosen some of your articles, that I consider interesting, to insert into the playfield, so to speak.
But even if you were not one of those few bloggers who’s posts I’ve chosen for my initial experiment, please bear with me and read the rest of this post. It might be interesting to you.
What I’ve discovered is a very new and fresh on-line game which does something novel. Instead of making players actively participate in the game, like all othe browser games, and as a result require a level of attention that not everyone can afford; it turns the concept on its head and makes the whole internet the playing field. This name of it is PMOG and I think it might have the capacity, if used right, to help the blogosphere and especially the atheosphere, become both more contextual and fun.
if you set aside than silly mine pranks and random fooling around with friends, the game’s true power appears in the form of missions. Basically what missions are (at least currently) is a collection of links to various pages in a serial format, along with a short description provided by the player who built the mission. This seemingly simple concept, allows something that is sorely missing.
You see, we currently have so much content produced every day that it is night impossible to find the truly interesting posts.The atheist blogroll is closing to a 1000 active blogs and it will only keep growing from there. I’m currently subscribed to almost all the blogs in the blogroll through an aggregator and I have to wade through a lot of uninteresting and repetitive posts every day just to find one or two that say something worth reading (for me).
Yes, I’ve prioritized a few blogs where almost everything written is interesting but I truly feel that there are underdogs out there who’s thoughts remain untapped while the big hitters like Pharyngula draw all the attention. Sure, places like Challenge Religion and the Carnival of the Godless help to cut through the mud, but their posts always seem disconnected from each other.
My idea then, is to use the mission capability of PMOG in order to create ad hoc “carnivals” that follow a theme and can also provide a customised commentary from the organiser in the form of pointers or clarifications.
This will have two effects that I can initially see:
We have cohesive groups of posts that do not depend on a computer algorithm or people belonging to the same group. Thus I may have a mission about ethics and link to people who are members of the atheosphere (generally Atheist blogroll or Planet Atheism) along with ones who are not but have something relevant to say and most of us would miss.
Given enough of us participating on this and allying with each other, we can push our missions to the top of the pile. This provides us with access to eyes we could not reach before.
Already, one mission on morality that I’ve created which hit 4/5 stars rating, generated 50 hits to my article which is almost as much as a CotG. If you consider that this game is still very very new and attracts people outside atheism as well, there is true potential to increase readership on the articles that are worth it.
Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg as well. Using items like portals for example, we can utilize our distributed power to create a network of relevant links. Imagine for example someone visiting the Expelled official website and the first thing that pops up is a 5-stars Expelled Exposed portal that the owners of Expelled cannot remove. As the popularity of the game increases, this can only grow more powerful for us, which is an even better reason to join in early.
Currently most missions are the random favorite sites each player has which just as fun (AKA not) as surfing on del.icio.us and makes the overall quality very low. I believe that if we can start improving this quality through the blogosphere, with better descriptions and interesting (underground or not) articles, we can easily take over.
Finally consider that the game can only become more interactive as time goes on. It will not be too long until we can create missions with riddles, votes and whatnot.
In any case, this was my little idea for the day. You can see the two initial missions that I’ve created as a proof of concept. For them, I used the items I marked as shared and starred in my google reader (It pays to do that sometimes).
Hopefully, I’ve managed to convince at least a few of you to try this out just in case it’s worth it. In case you do, please add me as an ally so that I am aware of you and we can run & rate each other’s missions.
One last thing. Currently the game is under a lot of load from a recent sudden popularity hit so you might run into the occasional slowness or outright failure. Also, I failed to mention it until now but it requires Firefox and a special extension in order to play it.
I tspent last afternoon trying to make this damn program work normally but for some reason I was always getting stuck when trying to register an account. Eventually I traced the problem with wine’s iexplore version which for some reason would freeze as soon as I start it. It would ask to download the gecko engine (if I hadn’t already downloaded it) and then display a white screen and become unresponsive. I tried various things, even testing it on a clean profile, but nothing fixed it (Wine 0.9.56 btw). This not working IE caused in turn Steam not to work well. It would open but it would also crash when clicking on the “create account” button.
Hopefully a quick googling directed me to the Ubuntu Forums and from there to the IEs for Linux page. Fortunately, that version of IE worked in my PC (PS: I was amazed by the simple and easy installation. Props to the developer!). Unfortunately I couldn’t it run through my normal wine installation. As it is installed on a different .wine directory, I tried linking to the iexplore.exe over there and replacing the one coming with wine but apparently due to different dlls, it didn’t work out. In exasperation, I renamed my .wine directory to winebak and copied the .ies4linux dir as .wine. I then installed Steam in that and started it.
It worked. And it worked perfectly. I was able to run it, create and account, log in and buy a game (which was the sole reason why I wasted my time making wine work) via a credit card (because paypal didn’t work).
Unfortunately, even though navigating steam worked very well, playing the game didn’t 🙁 Steam would vehemently complain that I didn’t have the current DirectX version when trying to run the game, even though I knew from the cracked version that it works without a problem. I could see no way around this unfortunately as I couldn’t figure out which .dlls are necessary to make Steam think I’ve got the correct one.
So, once again in exasperation, I renamed the current .wine dir to winebak2 and renamed winebak to .wine. I then copied the Steam client (which has Audiosurf installed) from winebak2 to .wine and tried again. Now steam would launch but would crash as soon as I logged in due to the annoying iexplore problem. Very fortunately for me, since Audiosurf created a program shortcut in the wine menu, I run it from there and lo and behold! It worked. (Albeit with the same problems as before)
So I now finally have an up-to-date version of Audiosurf and can finally submit my scores to the servers (which seem to running at a crawl, I guess do to the unforeseen popularity) . I must say that I’m loving it. A great luck that the game run on wine out of the box 🙂
Do you remember approximately one year ago when the Ryzom MMORPG was going bankrupt and a group of fans started a movement to buy the Ryzom assets that were being liquidized, and subsequently release them under the GPL (I even blogged about it here)? There was quite a number of donation promises coming in as well, with the FSF also promising (if I remember correctly) 50.000€ if the Free Ryzom movement was granted the assets. In the end there were about €200k promised in donations which is quite impressive if you think about it.
Well, even if you didn’t see it or don’t remember it, the end result was that a third company, Gameforge, bought the assets instead (after convincing the judge that they would be more capable on keeping a larger number of the workforce employed no less) and the Free Ryzom movement was put on hold (they did try to keep it going but it didn’t take off it seems).
To tell the truth, I was very curious on how a company could buy Ryzom which had already proved to have failed commercially and what they were planning to do with it. More importantly, how were they going to use this failing business to keep the previous employees working.
Well, it seems that they couldn’t. I just received a message from the Ryzom.org mailing list that they informed me that not only had the Gameforge France (the subsidiary that took over) had closed down 7 short months after taking over, but has also left their employees unpaid for quite some time and hasn’t even payed the first liquidator what they owed them.
Now, If you remember, the whole reason why Gameforge was granted the assets over the Free Ryzom movement was that the judge assumed that a corporate entity would be better suited to take care for the well being of the game and its supporting personnel than a rag tag bunch of hippies (or at least, that’s what I assume he thought). Does anyone else see the irony here? You can be damn certain that if Ryzom had gone free, not only would have the developers probably be better off, but the whole world would have benefited from the buyout. You can also be certain that the liquidator would have received a larger amount of money than they did now.
Currently, Gameforge Germany (the original company that has taken over, now that Gameforge France has liquidated) has shut down the game servers and many fear they will shut down the forums as well, leaving the remaining players no venue for information. This is actually the main reason why the announcement was sent to everyone who has registered in the past, so that the remaining player might be informed.
The actual time line of the situation is this:
January 2007 : Gameforge takes over Ryzom, creating Gameforge France.
August 2007 : Gameforge France stops paying its creditors, starting
the shutdown procedure. The employees haven’t been paid since June.
October 2007 : Gameforge France enters the liquidation procedure
(public announcement). Unlike the first liquidation, the judge
immediately shuts down the company and fires all the employees.
Nov-Dec 2007 : Issues in the procedure (see below) arise and add
further delay to an already lengthy process.
January 2008 : Gameforge Germany announces it will soon shutdown the
game servers.
February 2008 : The game servers are shutdown.
Now it seems that the previous free Ryzom movement is still waiting for the second liquidation to complete before they take any further actions. This might take a while as the situation has become even more complex by the gross mishandling of the situation by Gameforge. Nevertheless, once that is complete, hopefully, there will be another chance the acquire Ryzom and release it under the GPL and hopefully with a lower price tag as well.
However this whole situation irks me to no end.I just hope that no other “suitor” comes in and tries to take over Ryzom only to park it somewhere never to be seen again. I hope the judge will understand this time that giving the game to its own players who actually want to see it succeed instead of a random corporate entity with the only worry being it’s bottom line, is the better choice.
Let’s wait and see what happens. You check out the original announcement here
It’s been a while since I’ve posted hasn’t it. Fortunately it was not because of any dubious legal action against me (although I have taken steps to protect myself from any such actions from terrorizing estabilishments). I don’t really know why I have not been writing more this month but I guess I was simply not in the mood for it.
Various stuff have been going on then in December. Mostly I’ve been spending time with [tag]Viola[/tag] and helping her get her house in order (Fortunately that is over with). Other than that I’ve been using the rest of my free time reading for my upcoming Vista exam and playing The Witcher. This game is pretty much to blame to totally ignoring the blog in the last two weeks (as well as ignoring other unimportant stuff like, cleaning the house, exercising and bathing). It’s just hooked me.
It’s not so much that it’s revolutionary or unique or anything like that but it seem to have the correct combination of storyline and combat to keep my interest held. I especially liked how you seem to end up getting mixed up in politics and diplomacy without even wanting to. What really annoys me however and is also a reason why the game takes so long is the loading times. It is just horrible. Every time that enter a house or a small area, the loading time is quick enough, but as soon as I want to go out to the main part of the map it takes up to 30 seconds each time. It might not seem much but if you consider that it takes me about 10 seconds to go into a house and search for loot, and 35 secs to load the map, well, it starts to build up, especially if you consider that I have to enter a lot of houses for the various quests I take on.
I tried a defrag on both my main hdd and the game installation hdd but none worked so I guess I’m just stuck at this situation. Oh well, at least I can enjoy my new VGA 🙂
Other than that, I’ve spent the last few days configuring a laptop to play nice with Ubuntu and after some headaches I think I’ve managed to bring it up to a stable level, but I’m planning to write about this in a different post.
As for the Holidays, as always I did not bother to really get into the spirit of [tag]Giftmas[/tag]. I was happy that people decided to present me with gifts but I would appreciate it more if they felt like doing this outside of this celebration of consumerism. I was especially glad however that my sweet girlfriend gave me a gift she created herself. It consisted of a little booklet with a short comic story she drew herself (incredibly cute) and a gift of chocolate (along with a biscuit house). Great stuff 🙂
Now, new year is approaching fast and it just serves to remind me that the third decade of my life will not be long coming…
Close
Ad-blocker not detected
Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Learn more.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?w=980)
