buy the game rights?

kingpoker · September 3, 2007

i think spaz was saying to me buy the game off EA or somthing and then we could remake it , how much would this cost and what all would happen anyone know? i may be able to get the money up for it if its worth doing .

Apollyon · September 3, 2007

I expect the price would be pretty huge -- since you might well have to buy out rights to the Dune franchise. It may not make much money by EA standards, but in general it's still a pretty big money-spinner.

Maybe you could negotiate a specific 'remake' rights -- which would be a tricky one to organize (since you'd need to come to various agreements over how much you'd be allowed to differ from original material, lest you make a brand new Dune game) but would be presumably relatively cheap.

Not that I know anything about this kind of thing, mind you.

Megashrap · September 3, 2007

Christ, I would hate to venture on how much that would be (price that is).

kingpoker · September 3, 2007

well if any 1 does know about this kind of thing n makes me see that its worth while i could probably spend $20k - $30k but youd have to wait until im 18 on nov 8th .

Egeides · September 3, 2007

:D

From a super-mod, I don't know if you expect the cash back from it.

Apollyon · September 3, 2007

It isn't worthwhile, at least monetarily. I seriously doubt you'd make enough money out of a fullblown commerical version in the long-run to cover the expense.

Voodoo Daddy · September 3, 2007

I have been pondering this for a while, and have far more questions than answers, so here goes.

First King, you need to think a little about who we are dealing with.

EA is a $3B/yr company

They bought Westwood in 1998 for about $122M

Now their main focus is Sporting Games.

Now here's just a few of the Questions that have been rattling around in my head....

How would one go about establishing the valuation of their IP?(Intellectual Property) If someone is going to appear serious, he needs to know if EA throw a number at him, if the number is realistic, or are they just trying to make you go away.

Why do they NEED to get rid of it? Either sale or giving it away, it's costing them nothing to sit on it.

If in fact, the IP has no perceived value to EA, and no reasonable expectation of future value, could they be persuaded into giving up the IP? I think there are dangers in this approach (Having them give up the code to open source.) One thing we don't need is 10,000 hacked incompatible version of EMP floating around the web. It would be better if someone controlled it. In other words if the approach was "This game is now nothing more than a few online friends and we would like to see what we could do with it" and "It's an old game engine and no threat to you". But yet ideally we would want to control the rights to the game as well.

If you could get the IP, how could you Monetize it? I mean if you or I or anyone else was to purchase it, you would expect a reasonable return on your investment. How would this be accomplished? Certainly there are people in this community who the purchaser could partner with, like Apollyon, Ra-1024, and people from the Dune Editing community. But then what? A subscription model? A download game? What ever it was, it would have to be low budget, no filming cut scenes with out of work Star Trek actors, etc. Just a game.

I also have some thoughts on what should be changed in the game, but that's better left to another thread.

Apollyon · September 3, 2007

Not to mention that a noncommercial version is and always has been viable as a community project -- whether as a mod of existing, newer games, or as a stand-alone designed from the ground up. But projects such as this, which require participators with considerable expertise, are notoriously difficult to follow through till the end without real incentive (i.e. pay and professional management/scheduling/evaluation). They usually succeed based on the hard work of a few fanatical core staff, as is the case with any larger game mod or independently developed game.

jeff2429 · September 4, 2007

I got $5. Should be enough right? ;D

Apollyon · September 4, 2007

Yes, just wire it to me and I'll get on the case immediately.

*Dreams of all the things he could buy with 5 bucks*

alchemi2 · September 5, 2007

Would you really need to change the game that much?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Interactive

A budget re realease with an intense marketing strategy and a resident server (don't know if RA's could handle huge demand.)

A patch for the remaining bugs and some new maps. I seem to remember Jules saying there were some unfinished or just unused features within the existing game these could be activated.

As to cost you would probably be looking in the region of a few 100,000 minimum.

If you have the time and inclination you could probably research it on that handy home tool the world wide web.

Just look at an old game/s that has/have be successful relaunched/revamped and track what that/they cost.

Also any business offer/approach would need to find why Emperor failed!

There's several threads on here giving everyone opinions on that.

gunner154 · September 5, 2007

Budget re-releases are happening to many games already. Age Of Empires Gold (the first one) is going at like S$10 here (US$4+?), re-released by Ubisoft. Hope?

JulesG · September 5, 2007

Would you really need to change the game that much?
A budget re realease with an intense marketing strategy and a resident server (don't know if RA's could handle huge demand.)
A patch for the remaining bugs and some new maps. I seem to remember Jules saying there were some unfinished or just unused features within the existing game these could be activated.

Support on XP and Vista is patchy, many modern graphics cards fail with Emperor, so yes lots of work there...

...plus the XBF format is 1) unknown, 2) not owned by EA and 3) a pig to construct in

Most of the unused stuff is only partially complete and the code is riddled with errors (many rules and artini things dont work as planned).

As much as I love Emperor, it is not going to raise interest in the wider public when they can buy Starcraft II, C&C 3 Expansion etc etc next year.

Remember when Emperor came out it BOMBED!! - no one bought it outside of our little community even though it was the first 3D C&C game and got a reasonable review from PCGamer (score was either 78% or 80% cant remember now).

Many catching ideas (eg Stargate, Star Wars) have either had bad games made and not sold that well or cancelled during development and they have MASS following. (I exclude the old TIE Fighter and KOTR games as these did fairly well - but still did not sell in mass volumes like the football franchise games).

I suggest you keep your money and invest it somewhere where you will get a better return - how about sub-prime loans?

alchemi2 · September 5, 2007

Budget re-releases are happening to many games already. Age Of Empires Gold (the first one) is going at like S$10 here (US$4+?), re-released by Ubisoft. Hope?

The main problem with any Emperor re-release is the lack of the offical game server, i've come across quite a few people who have the game and have never played on-line. I even got a few to try out XWIS/RA server but many can't bebothered with the hassle and how many more are out there who don't even know about either Fed2k or the Ra Server.

It's like most games that lose offical support, doomed to remain a cult classic for the few die hard fans.

alchemi2 · September 5, 2007

Remember when Emperor came out it BOMBED!! - no one bought it outside of our little community even though it was the first 3D C&C game and got a reasonable review from PCGamer (score was either 78% or 80% cant remember now).

I still ardently believe that the reason Emperor (Bombed) was down to a severe lack of marketing and availability. Also the on-line games were hugely laggy and slow, even now it is rare for an 8 player game to load and work.

But on-line play is probably 10 times better than it was back then and I'm not talking player quality just the game quality.

And EA did put the death blow on the game when they failed to support it, patch it or just simply maintain it, which unsurprisingly happen with the majority of EA games.