[MYHOUSE.MAP]

gerolf, on 27 April 2014 - 08:44 PM, said:

I'm going to dig into the whole Strife thing a bit more. I've never heard of the publisher "Velocity", I don't think they exist anymore either. Strife's source code was lost, so maybe the IP was lost as well..

Also ROTT is the property of 3DR and Interceptor, correct? That would mean that those alphas/betas (even the early stuff that ran on a much less modified Wolf engine) could also be released like the Duke 3d and SW stuff?

IIRC, ROTT was sold to Apogee LLC. However, the owner of the new Apogee is a longtime associate of 3DR, so I'm sure he wouldn't have a problem releasing beta material.

[Jimmy]

I think the Wolf3D connection might make that a sticky sort of situation though.

[MYHOUSE.MAP]

Jimmy, on 27 April 2014 - 10:21 PM, said:

I think the Wolf3D connection might make that a sticky sort of situation though.

They probably could release the 1995 prototype with little difficulty, since that one was made long after the transition from Wolf3D assets was made.

[DNSKILL5]

ROTT used the Wolf 3d engine and Id had nothing to do with the game at all. Plus they released a lot of tile sets and information about it already from when it was just a Wolf 3d sequel.

[Frederik Schreiber]

hogsy, on 27 April 2014 - 04:16 PM, said:

Could also be worth asking someone at ID if they can get you in contact with anyone from Bethesda in regards to the Prey builds.

We heard back from Bethesda.
They don't want the Prey builds released or shown currently.
It's a sensitive matter atm, and I fully understand that.

I'll bring it up again, once the next Prey game is announced, and see if they are interested in collaborating on something exciting at that time.

[hogsy]

Frederik Schreiber, on 28 April 2014 - 12:00 AM, said:

We heard back from Bethesda.
They don't want the Prey builds released or shown currently.

[Mr. Tibbs]

Not surprising. Bethesda did a truly shitty thing. They won't say anything positive about Prey until Arkane has something substantial to show to the public.

[Micky C]

Frederik Schreiber, on 28 April 2014 - 12:00 AM, said:

We heard back from Bethesda.
They don't want the Prey builds released or shown currently.
It's a sensitive matter atm, and I fully understand that.

I'll bring it up again, once the next Prey game is announced, and see if they are interested in collaborating on something exciting at that time.

Did they specifically use the word "currently"? If so, it's better than nothing.

[FTW23065]

Getting back to Strife for a while here:

Since both Rogue Entertainment and Velocity are defunct now, it's owned by no one. Take Two? I don't think so, if it would be true, there should be some info at least.

[Kristian Joensen]

FTW23065, on 28 April 2014 - 01:19 AM, said:

Getting back to Strife for a while here:

Since both Rogue Entertainment and Velocity are defunct now, it's owned by no one. Take Two? I don't think so, if it would be true, there should be some info at least.

Sorry it doesn't work like that. When companies go bankrupt the assets are sold. I think Take Two was mentioned as a possibility since they bought some Velocity assets. There are a lot of nuances and details beyond that and things are different when companies don't go bankrupt. For example some times the owner(s) of a company will voluntarily disband a company even though it is doing fine financially. What happens in that case will vary but typically you would also sell of the assets. But if you care about something in particular you might hold on to it for potential later use. But in general? The assets will be sold in some kind of auction. Here we are talking about the kinds of bankruptcies that companies don't emerge from. Companies that get restructured will hold on to some of their old assets. But as I understand it neither of those two companies exist anymore, right? If so then yeah, the Strife rights will belong to one or more parties. Those parties might not even know that they own Strife.

[Frederik Schreiber]

When going bankrupt a curator takes care of selling the remaining assets to potential bidders - Or keeps them himself (Curator Company), if there are none.
Nothing is ever "Owned by no one"

[Kristian Joensen]

Unless US copyright terms are extended retroactively again Strife will be public domain there in 2091. But that is not a safe bet as Disney and co will likely buy such extension legislation again.

[Mike12]

The copyright system - while I certainly see the use + need for it - sure does have a tendency to be a big, overcomplicated piece of shit sometimes. Still, not much you can do until somebody with the rights gives the okay - with such a clusterfuck of a system, it's all the more reason not get yourself too tangled in it.

[PikaCommando]

So, how much does these Blood and Prey rights cost anyway?

[Kristian Joensen]

PikaCommando, on 28 April 2014 - 05:25 AM, said:

So, how much does these Blood and Prey rights cost anyway?

That can vary a lot 3DR and Remedy sold the Max Payne IP in a deal worth approximately 45 Million while Stainless bought back the Carmageddon IP for a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

Blood is probably worth a lot less than Max Payne but MAY well be worth more than Carmageddon.

[Sem]

I dunno... It feels like Blood could not be worth that much to buy, yet still it could bring such a good income thanks to the impact the game has made and it's still making. I remember when people tried to have the game remade in HD and everybody went woooo, until the company who owns such thing (Atari, I believe?) stopped the project and they went ahhhh.... I dunno if the people who knows the rights for the game is selling it, but I think it can bring some money! Right Interceptor? *winkwink*

[Hool]

hogsy, on 28 April 2014 - 12:30 AM, said:

Oh well, there was no harm in trying I suppose.

[FTW23065]

Frederik Schreiber, on 28 April 2014 - 04:23 AM, said:

When going bankrupt a curator takes care of selling the remaining assets to potential bidders - Or keeps them himself (Curator Company), if there are none.
Nothing is ever "Owned by no one"

Thanks for correcting me.

[DNSKILL5]

Strife lost its source code, and was reversed engineered by fans to have source ports and also work on things like ZDoom and Skulltag. Doom, Duke, etc all have a source release (obviously not Blood). If fans can reverse engineer the Strife code without any legal issues, I don't see how sharing prototype material of Strife would cause any problems. Just my opinion.

Did Bethesda say anything about the Doom and Wolfenstein prototypes?

[Inspector Lagomorf]

gerolf, on 28 April 2014 - 10:02 AM, said:

If fans can reverse engineer the Strife code without any legal issues, I don't see how sharing prototype material of Strife would cause any problems. Just my opinion.

You're not giving the IP-holders enough credit. Sure, they might not be voicing their opinions out loud about the series yet, but say some dedicated fan decided to make a sequel to Strife, and news started making the rounds on major gaming sites. Most of the major publishers have legal teams working around the clock; they would pick up on the publicity, check what IPs they actually own, realize that there's money to be had from this intellectual property they had all but forgotten, and be on you faster than flies on shit.

And the reason is as somebody else said - stopping potential competition. Anytime I imagine a game publisher being inquired about selling a decades-old IP, I imagine a bratty little trading card-collecting child whining "Only if you give me a billion zillion dollars!"

[DNSKILL5]

Blzut3 said:

One thing I did notice while going through some of the laws is that, since the game is not sold anywhere, the copyright does not appear to be registered, and we have no idea who owns it. It might be the case that the owner could only sue for "real damages." Given the situation those real damages would amount to $0. I'm not a lawyer though so I could be (and likely am) totally wrong.

[MrFlibble]

Comrade Major, on 28 April 2014 - 10:11 AM, said:

Sure, they might not be voicing their opinions out loud about the series yet, but say some dedicated fan decided to make a sequel to Strife, and news started making the rounds on major gaming sites. Most of the major publishers have legal teams working around the clock; they would pick up on the publicity, check what IPs they actually own, realize that there's money to be had from this intellectual property they had all but forgotten, and be on you faster than flies on shit.

Sounds like a perfect plan to find out who actually owns Strife IP now - have some major gaming/modding sites leak fake info about a potential copyright infringement project, and check where a cease & desist order will come from

[MYHOUSE.MAP]

Sem, on 28 April 2014 - 08:03 AM, said:

I dunno... It feels like Blood could not be worth that much to buy, yet still it could bring such a good income thanks to the impact the game has made and it's still making. I remember when people tried to have the game remade in HD and everybody went woooo, until the company who owns such thing (Atari, I believe?) stopped the project and they went ahhhh.... I dunno if the people who knows the rights for the game is selling it, but I think it can bring some money! Right Interceptor? *winkwink*

An official enhanced source port ala Megaton Edition wouldn't bring in nearly enough to cover the likely millions needed for purchasing the IP, along with lawyer fees. Despite what people on here occasionally think, Blood is a pretty niche game and wouldn't move nearly enough units of a paid source port to make acquiring the IP worth it. Unless you somehow managed to make Blood mainstream or get it endorsed by major opinion leaders to convince people to buy the token source port on Steam in masses, it's better off rotting in IP hell from a financial point of view. Since finances ultimately are the reason why games are made, Blood is screwed for the time being.

MrFlibble, on 28 April 2014 - 12:20 PM, said:

Sounds like a perfect plan to find out who actually owns Strife IP now - have some major gaming/modding sites leak fake info about a potential copyright infringement project, and check where a cease & desist order will come from

The problem with that is that you'd piss off whoever owned the IP, so good luck trying to convince them to greenlight something like a beta being released.

[Tea Monster]

By the time you updated it and modernized it, you could grab another IP, Phantasm for example, and have just as nice a game with weird cultists, dark underground caverns and weird creatures trying to kill you.

[MYHOUSE.MAP]

Tea Monster, on 28 April 2014 - 02:34 PM, said:

By the time you updated it and modernized it, you could grab another IP, Phantasm for example, and have just as nice a game with weird cultists, dark underground caverns and weird creatures trying to kill you.

Hell, you could probably MAKE a new IP and game for it with the amount of money getting the Blood IP and making a source port of it would cost.

[Micky C]

This thread is really starting to go off-topic. I know this is duke4.net, but this is the one of those few threads where we should keep it as reserved for its original purpose as possible: the sharing of and discussion directly related to released/releasable assets.

Clearly every time someone brings up something unrelated Blood/Doom here it just spirals into a discussion about who owns what, which quite frankly has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Edit: Not to mention we already have a separate discussion about the future of blood happening right now in another thread...

Blood/Prey it out of reach for the foreseeable future. Posting here isn't going to change that.

Show me some early hollywood holocaust!

[Person of Color]

Mickey C, on 28 April 2014 - 04:53 PM, said:

Show me some early hollywood holocaust!

Okay.

[Damien_Azreal]

Frederik Schreiber, on 27 April 2014 - 02:04 PM, said:

We'll have to clear this with ID before talking about it.
Sorry Riny, they own Doom and we want to respect their confidentiality.

We'll see what we can do

And, actually, you'd have to get in contact with Bethesda/ZeniMax for that as well. As they own id, they are also the owners of the Doom IP now.

Kristian Joensen, on 28 April 2014 - 06:58 AM, said:

That can vary a lot 3DR and Remedy sold the Max Payne IP in a deal worth approximately 45 Million while Stainless bought back the Carmageddon IP for a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

Blood is probably worth a lot less than Max Payne but MAY well be worth more than Carmageddon.

The issue isn't with how much Blood is worth, it's with how much Warner Bros are pricing it at.
They are intentionally overpricing the IP because they have no interest in selling it. So, to discourage people they throw out incredibly overblown prices.

[Marcos]

Getting a little off about the current subject, any clues about the spacesuit??

[Hendricks266]

Marcos, on 28 April 2014 - 08:09 PM, said:

Getting a little off about the current subject, any clues about the spacesuit??

We have its HUD art tiles in the proper positions, glare included. I tried finding a location where I could take a screenshot, but in 30 minutes of trying I didn't find one, and the final game's Dark Side crashed.