City of Titans - spiritual successor to CoH - Kickstarter

[UnSub]

You just need a willing fanbase and then promise that you will make their favourite game, only better.

I'm curious to learn if Unreal is getting about $150k from those funds under the royalty deal.

[Xanthippe]

I can't recall if I ever knew this or not, so I'll ask because I was wondering.

Who owns the assets for CoX and what's stopping someone from buying it and slapping it up online?

I guess this all points out just how little I know about costs involved in maintaining an MMO with not many players. I don't understand the economics of the business of games much.

[koro]

NCSoft still owns the CoX assets and things, and what's stopping somebody from buying it is NCSoft isn't selling. To my understanding, the folks at Paragon wanted to buy the game back from NCSoft but NCSoft wouldn't budge.

[Stormwaltz]

I've noticed many of the PC emote animations are "Cryptic stock," and also appear in STO and Champions. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other things under the hood (like the character customization systems) that were specifically granted to NC when Cryptic broke away.

Now Cryptic part of Perfect World, an NC competitor, which would complicate things even further.

[UnSub]

As above, NCsoft owns all the IP around CoH/V. Cryptic owns the engine, but apparently granted Paragon Studios an unlimited licence to it when it came to CoH/V. I'm pretty sure that Jack Emmert of Cryptic indicated he'd do the same if CoH/V was picked up with new owners. There was an immediate forum rumour when CoH/V's shutdown was announced that Cryptic was standing in the way of the sale, but they said they weren't.

Paragon Studios had a good few months notice that they were going to be shut down and couldn't reach a deal with NCsoft to buy CoH/V out. There were rumours that Trion had shown an interest, but that NCsoft wanted US$80m for the IP. (Not unreasonable when CoH/V was making US$20m a year, not so when it was down to about US$10m or so in its last year.)

Regardless, NCsoft doesn't sell off its failures. Tabula Rasa, Dungeon Runners, whichever ones I've forgotten - if you fail at NCsoft, they shut the game down rather then sell a title for pennies that then becomes a competitor for their other games.

[Merusk]

Not selling them off also gives them a stable of properties they can return to later, if they choose.  While ideas are cheap, brands are not.

[Father mike]

Not selling them off also gives them a stable of properties they can return to later, if they choose.  While ideas are cheap, brands are not.

It would be interesting to see if anyone had done research on the way being out of circulation affects a brand's value.  Does more time in the vault make it increasingly irrelevant or does it drive the nostalga factor thru the roof?

I would suppose it varies on a number of factors like mindshare during the initial run, etc.

[Velorath]

Not selling them off also gives them a stable of properties they can return to later, if they choose.  While ideas are cheap, brands are not.

I think if someone offered them a sandwich for the rights to Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault, they'd be smart to take it.

[Stormwaltz]

I think if someone offered them a sandwich for the rights to Tabula Rasa and Auto Assault, they'd be smart to take it.

I've got cheese. Let's Kickstart for a loaf of bread and get on this.

First stretch goal: mustard. More to be unlocked later!

[Ingmar]

I would totally buy the rights to Auto Assault!

[Falconeer]

Make a kickstarter and I am gonna back you up big time!

[Falconeer]

NECRO!

After a long silence, they released... something.

We’ve finished a very, very big step forward for City of Titans.
We made our first packaged executable that we can call ‘the game’. We’ve done them before for demos, we’ve made beat-em-ups, but we didn’t have a structured login-auth-lobby-game process running.

What you’re going to see is the recorded video of the first packaged build of the game. The User Interface isn’t finished, but it’s a functional first pass - all the buttons work.

Here's the video they are talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BswGrULkZao


More words:

What’s that mean? Up to now, everything you’ve seen has been run from inside the Unreal Editor, the game builder environment. Now, we’ve got an executable program that can run on any computer. (Well, not any computer - we targeted this build for Windows, 64 bit. You need to make a separate build for OSX or Linux.) We’ve got something we could give to someone and say ‘here, run this’ and it would work.

Things went wrong as we built it. They always do. We were hoping to show you the character creator itself, we were hoping to load and save the character design. It works in the editor. But, well, it blew up as we packaged. Around midnight last wednesday we decided that we had found the problems - but it was going to take longer than we had to fix them. So we disabled them - but only for the moment.

We’ve supplemented that with video of the standalone character morphing technology - you’ve seen our body and face sliders as standalone pictures. Here’s some of them live and in action.

What you see here is hard. It’s not done, but it’s some of the hardest work we’ve had to do for the game.

Why? Because a lot of other people are trying to use Unreal, and a lot of them are trying to make a game about punching other people in the face. And they’re all talking about the fun stuff. But a much smaller group is talking about the hard stuff. And even fewer are doing anything closer to what we’re trying to do - a massively multiplayer game, with a patcher that can patch itself, which saves your character design on a server, so you can load it wherever you go.   

We needed a splash screen, a logon screen, a lobby, and our character room.

We’ve shown you the sliders - and we’ve got so many sliders. Fully flexible, fully functional ones. Sliders for the body, sliders for the face. Save the character to your hard drive. Save the character to the network. And, most importantly, load it back up again.

Of course, with new advances come new problems - we don’t have hair working yet because the fancy things the head does? Well, if you make the head bigger, it swallows the hairline - and bald superheroes are in style, but balding ones aren’t. We know how to solve that - but we’re not there yet.

On the other hand, our mocap studio works pretty okay. All it required was two hundred dollars in software and a kinect. We even have fingers working!

We needed network infrastructure - authentication and authorization - patcher servers, chat servers (it’s not in the video) and so many other things.

We’re not done. But we’re getting there.