Wing Commander Rights

Bandit LOAF

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
DefianceIndustries said:
Don't the WC rights lapse back to Chris Roberts at some point or am I nuts? :)
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Sadly, no. Chris has the TV and movie rights, and he gets the distribution rights to the film back next year... but the games (and their related spinoffs) will always sit with Electronic Arts (unless they sell them off.)

The real problem with pitching a Wing Commander (or Mass Effect) project at EA right now is that the first question you're asked is: why don't we make it Star Wars and make three times as much money? Which is fair, however unfortunate.

But let's start a different thread for rights stuff if there's more to say, I really like the intros in this one!

And congratulations, Afrim!!! That's totally awesome, please post some pictures from the ceremony if they're share-able!
 
Jdawg said:
agree bandit but let me say I thought bioware and EA were making a new mass effect game
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They are! It's been in development since mid-2012, before the Star Wars deal was signed. But you'll probably also notice they've stepped back their support for the franchise since then... there was a period where Mass Effect novels, comics, memorabilia, mobile games, etc. were everywhere and now there's nothing particularly exciting. (There's very little promotion for Andromeda... I'm sure it'll get a blitz later this year, but for now there's a cinematic trailer or so and a bunch of news stories about leads leaving the project.)

Everyone's goal has always been to get 'our Star Wars'... Disney was in the same boat, and it lead to spending big bucks developing movies like John Carter, Tron Legacy and Guardians of the Galaxy (and, somehow in some executive's mind, Tomorrowland.) Once they actually OWNED Star Wars, they completely killed their Tron projects, and are now at a bit of a loss for what to do with Guardians right now. (It's a good question: do you keep making Star Wars AND your version of Star Wars? Both are a success, but they've found themselves competing with themselves.)
 
I remember hearing that Chris wanted to have StarCitizen use the Wing Commander licence but that didn't come to pass.
If EA has no interest in pursuing their own WC titles so long as they have the Star Wars licence any idea why they weren't willing to sell the rights to produce games? Was the money on the table simply not worth the time of such a large corporation?
 
Pedro said:
I remember hearing that Chris wanted to have StarCitizen use the Wing Commander licence but that didn't come to pass.
If EA has no interest in pursuing their own WC titles so long as they have the Star Wars licence any idea why they weren't willing to sell the rights to produce games? Was the money on the table simply not worth the time of such a large corporation?
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Short answer: wait for the tell-all book. :) It came very close.
 
Mass effect has a big following I dont see a star wars game as being direct competition unless they were dumb and released them at the same time, if I remember correctly most mass effect games came out in feb or march, keep up that and release a star wars game in November. Ifigured they were taking longer bc of the big backlash that happened with mass effect 3 and probably designing a new engine for the new systems. I dont see any problems with guardians of the galaxy 2 at all either, I heard their looking at kurt russel to play star lords dad. Just bc star wars was a huge success doenst mean it will hurt guardians 2 in fact it will prob help it and piggy back off star wars.
 
In fact I think star wars being a huge sucess will only help the scifi movie genre, much like iron man/x men helped spur the super hero genre. I mean how many super hero movies are coming out this yr, we have batman v superman, suicide squad, captain america civil war, x men Apocalypse, and deadpool. there may be more that is just off the top of my head.

Now in scifi we have guardians 2 coming soon, star wars, star trek, prometheus 2, they have greenlight blade runner 2 with harrison ford, and a battlestar galatica movie is in development
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Short answer: wait for the tell-all book. :) It came very close.
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I'm not very educated on IP rights and the like, but would it be possible (and legal) for someone (like Chris Roberts, for example) to make a Kickstarter or any kind of funding campaign to purchase the remaining rights? I'd rather see Wing Commander return in an official capacity even if it's out from under EA's control, instead of collecting dust in a (Mythic) museum.
 
That would also assume that EA wanted to sell the rights. I'm not sure why they wouldn't, they aren't doing anything with them. But the inner mysteries of EA are oftentimes beyond me.
 
DefianceIndustries said:
That would also assume that EA wanted to sell the rights. I'm not sure why they wouldn't, they aren't doing anything with them. But the inner mysteries of EA are oftentimes beyond me.
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Exactly my thinking. They're not doing anything with it, so why keep it locked up.

At this point, with EA's recent business practices, I wouldn't even want to see them pull a WC game out of thin air. Too many season passes, microtransactions and games broken at launch, and still broken sometime afterward. Though, I guess you can say that's become the game market overall, sadly...
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Short answer: wait for the tell-all book. :) It came very close.
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Well, that begs the question - is there a tell-all book in the works? I'm very curious about what happened with that, because it all seemed so bizarre to me at the time: on the one hand, the rumours about him negotiating with EA, while on the other hand, CIG was pushing the Star Citizen universe forward at full steam. It just didn't seem to make sense.

Lt.Overload said:
I'm not very educated on IP rights and the like, but would it be possible (and legal) for someone (like Chris Roberts, for example) to make a Kickstarter or any kind of funding campaign to purchase the remaining rights? I'd rather see Wing Commander return in an official capacity even if it's out from under EA's control, instead of collecting dust in a (Mythic) museum.
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Well, sure. But unless that person had already obtained a promise from EA, in writing, that they will sell the license to him for a particular price, it would be a completely impossible campaign to run. I mean, would you pledge money into a campaign when you don't know if EA is interested at all, or if the money being raised is sufficient to meet their expectations? Also, whoever that person would be, there's one person it wouldn't be: Chris Roberts. By this point, the WC license is worse than useless to him, it would actually be harmful, because it would put into question his commitment to Star Citizen.

Which raises the other point - whoever would like to make a new Wing Commander game, would be competing with Star Citizen. EA certainly can do it. But who else out there would want to risk that?
 
Lt.Overload said:
I'm not very educated on IP rights and the like, but would it be possible (and legal) for someone (like Chris Roberts, for example) to make a Kickstarter or any kind of funding campaign to purchase the remaining rights?
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Yeah, that's basically what Chris Roberts did in 2012. :) He was wildly successful beyond what anyone dreamed. Still didn't end up with the WC rights. So the game became/remained Star Citizen.

Lt.Overload said:
At this point, with EA's recent business practices, I wouldn't even want to see them pull a WC game out of thin air. Too many season passes, microtransactions and games broken at launch, and still broken sometime afterward. Though, I guess you can say that's become the game market overall, sadly...
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I don't think that's really a fair assessment of EA or the broader gaming market. All of those things certainly exist, and probably moreso than we want or need, but the usage varies widely. EA is made up of many studios, and each still has its own take on things. Some have none of the issues you mention, some have multiple, it just depends. Even EA has fantastic studios putting out some great stuff these days. There are companies that fully embraced freemium models and season passes just a year or three ago that have completely abandoned them for their next games now. And when done right, those aren't necessarily bad ways to do games. It comes down to the creativity and talent of the individual people making the product.
 
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I have to agree with the naysayer's (because I'm pessimistically optimistic as I get older, being wiser is open for debate). EA have proven that Star Wars is a cash cow, even when they put little content out there. As everyone will know, I am referring to Star Wars Battlefront. It has beaten EA's projections and continues to sell strongly, they made a lot of money in a very short time. That's EA's mantra.

New EA SW game sells badly (Dec 2015) : http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...es-after-gamestop-claim-launch-underperformed
12 Millions copies sold (Jan 2016): http://www.idigitaltimes.com/star-w...million-sold-more-free-dlc-coming-soon-500710
That is a pretty fast turn around is less than a month! :eek:

As for Mass Effect Andromida, yes it was in production before EA got the rights to Star Wars. Now which is more popular and has more traction and has a mass appeal to all audiences? Simply ME has a smaller audience than SW. Sure from a fan perspective we all want ME and SW to co-exist, hey why not a cross over lol (sorry, being silly). EA will expand on it's SW portfolio as it's the less riskier option and guarantees to make shareholders and many gamers happy. Same way with how they have done with Sports. :p

As for Wing Commander, why would they sell something off when they don't need to? Why sell a license which could negatively affect their brand if it turns out badly? Why compete against a large franchise, when WC is already inspired by SW? They are too similar in concept, just set in different universe/time period. It's best to keep all your cards close to your chest, even when the company is nothing but a shell, because income is still going to come in from sales of a back catalogue, with an income, no matter how small in comparison, with no expenditure, the dimes all add up. Probably enough to pay for the Champaign lunch each day for the EA execs. :cool:

Look at Interplay, they hold the licence to many Star Trek game, do they even make games anymore?
http://www.interplay.com/ (Perhaps they do :p)

In the end of the day the suits make the decisions, the Command and Conquer community are still waiting for their new game since Red Alert 3. :eek: How many C&C projects have they cancelled since then, at least 2 I know of. How many WC games have EA killed off, many that we know of. :oops: How many have they worked behind the scene's on and never announced, will we ever know?

All that is written without any animosity or negative feeling (read it in an upbeat way), but the tl;dr of it is if we want to see a Wing Commander and live up to the community's expectations then the community needs to build it. SO many awesome projects out there made by the fans, this community is definitely not lacking the talent. Just time, commitment and structure to a very large and complex project. We can't rely on EA to make it, or for Chris to re-skin Star Citizen, because it may never happen; but we all want it to happen :D :D :D

I've added some smiley faces, because reading all that may make me come across negative and a miserable sod. :mad:

Disclaimer: The above is all just my personal opinion, I have no inside knowledge to how the world really works, but I've lived long enough to become disappointed by it enough times. :p
 
I agree that if EA were to dip into the space sim genre again they'd be more likely to look towards X-Wing or TIE Figther as long as they hold the reigns to Star Wars. And I hope they do because that would be awesome. :p

As for Star Citizen I'm not bothered that he never got the Wing Commander rights. It's allowed them to make something that's "close enough" without being creatively tied down by Wing Commander's continuity and mythos.
 
Well, that begs the question - is there a tell-all book in the works? I'm very curious about what happened with that, because it all seemed so bizarre to me at the time: on the one hand, the rumours about him negotiating with EA, while on the other hand, CIG was pushing the Star Citizen universe forward at full steam. It just didn't seem to make sense.
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I think it's generally public knowledge that Star Citizen came from an attempt to bring back Wing Commander. There were some very elaborate plans for how to make that work, most interestingly developing in Detroit to take advantage of tax incentives offered by the state of Michigan at the time (boy, would that have been a harder relocation than moving to Santa Monica.) That fell through, and Chris decided to go it on his own with a crowd funding campaign, spending a year or more building a demo by himself. By the time we'd kicked off the viral (the 42-day marketing campaign before the Kickstarter was announced intended to remind people who Chris was and tease the new universe), there wasn't any plan to be a Wing Commander game... that was a year or more in the past. But then there were some last minute talks about getting the Wing Commander IP, based on the strength of that campaign, and at one point I know I did put together a plan for how we'd loop around and get back to 'our' universe. I think Chris hinted at that at one point in 2012 (which you're thinking of), but the details are a matter of public record.

But yes, Sandi and I will write one heck of a book after all this is done. :)

Look at Interplay, they hold the licence to many Star Trek game, do they even make games anymore?
http://www.interplay.com/ (Perhaps they do :p)
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I think Interplay doesn't hold the current Star Trek license... they simply own the creative for the games they had developed in the 90s. And to their credit, they have FINALLY licensed them to GOG and company! (MORE, PLEASE!)
 
DefianceIndustries said:
Yep - I'm waiting on Klingon Academy
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Yaaas! I will say, I hate how retro game licensing works these days. I wish GOG, Steam, Virtual Console, etc. would work to license catalogs instead of cherry-picking the most popular games. Having an iTunes style service that lets you play all the 'lesser' games from previous years would be a huge win. (I don't NEED to buy Super Mario Bros. 3 every year... but there's thousands of third party Nintendo games I couldn't afford when I was ten and would happily pay five bucks for now. The same with Origin games... great to have Ultima and Wing Commander, but going the extra mile and having stuff like Cybermage, Moebius, Space Rogue, etc. would be a lot more fun. So if you're reading this, Gabe, please give me ten million dollars to run Steam Classic... :))
 
Bandit LOAF said:
Yaaas! I will say, I hate how retro game licensing works these days. I wish GOG, Steam, Virtual Console, etc. would work to license catalogs instead of cherry-picking the most popular games. Having an iTunes style service that lets you play all the 'lesser' games from previous years would be a huge win. (I don't NEED to buy Super Mario Bros. 3 every year... but there's thousands of third party Nintendo games I couldn't afford when I was ten and would happily pay five bucks for now. The same with Origin games... great to have Ultima and Wing Commander, but going the extra mile and having stuff like Cybermage, Moebius, Space Rogue, etc. would be a lot more fun. So if you're reading this, Gabe, please give me ten million dollars to run Steam Classic... :))
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I agree with this completely. The stuff that "fills in the gaps" hold more interest to me than buying the same AAA licensed games from 20 years ago for the third time. (DOS < Win95/95 < GOG)
 
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