Both offices listed as 'spellborn' (nv, works, etc) are for sale!
KVK - Kamer van koophandel - Information service on all registered companies in the Netherlands lists:


De Bruyn Kopsstraat 14, 2288ED Rijswijk ZH


And:


Laan van Vredenoord 1, 2289DA Rijswijk ZH


Googling those will give you sites on which these offices are for sale!

That could mean those companies are getting out of service for good, which could mean they want to sell their Intellectual property (= spellborn). I hope they find someone who makes a reasonable bit, so they become the new owners. Unfortunately, we have too few players to buy the IP for ourselves.. If we had 10.000 players, 4-6 million dollars might be possible to achieve.  I personally think spellborn represents a value, in it's current state, of about 4-6 million dollars. Let's look at it.. It uses an outdated engine, with lots of bugs, has no real market position, no-one knows of it's existence. The graphics are not '2011'. It still looks nice to the fans, because they like the artstyle, and it's still the only game in which grinding was fully optional, but I did it anyway, just because the combat was fun .  Perhaps some company could sell spellborn as shareware? We have to pay exactly as much as needed to cover the monthly bills, no less, no more? And they open the SDK (I doubt Unreal even allows this), so we can create our own content for the game.


I think that's the real problem. I think spellborn would have gone open source a long time ago, if not for that stupid Unreal engine. It's either troubles with unreal licensing, or troubles with the financiers of spellborn, that they are unwilling to see that this was a bad investment and they should move on. They are only making it less and less valuable.


And: everything get's leaked these days, but the spellborn source is still safe.. Ironic..

Both offices listed as 'spellborn' (nv, works, etc) are for sale!
KVK - Kamer van koophandel - Information service on all registered companies in the Netherlands lists:


De Bruyn Kopsstraat 14, 2288ED Rijswijk ZH


And:


Laan van Vredenoord 1, 2289DA Rijswijk ZH


Googling those will give you sites on which these offices are for sale!

That could mean those companies are getting out of service for good, which could mean they want to sell their Intellectual property (= spellborn). I hope they find someone who makes a reasonable bit, so they become the new owners. Unfortunately, we have too few players to buy the IP for ourselves.. If we had 10.000 players, 4-6 million dollars might be possible to achieve.  I personally think spellborn represents a value, in it's current state, of about 4-6 million dollars. Let's look at it.. It uses an outdated engine, with lots of bugs, has no real market position, no-one knows of it's existence. The graphics are not '2011'. It still looks nice to the fans, because they like the artstyle, and it's still the only game in which grinding was fully optional, but I did it anyway, just because the combat was fun .  Perhaps some company could sell spellborn as shareware? We have to pay exactly as much as needed to cover the monthly bills, no less, no more? And they open the SDK (I doubt Unreal even allows this), so we can create our own content for the game.


I think that's the real problem. I think spellborn would have gone open source a long time ago, if not for that stupid Unreal engine. It's either troubles with unreal licensing, or troubles with the financiers of spellborn, that they are unwilling to see that this was a bad investment and they should move on. They are only making it less and less valuable.


And: everything get's leaked these days, but the spellborn source is still safe.. Ironic..

Oh, we've come to the conclusion that they were up for sale a couple months ago as well. But; it's good that you mentioned that, might be better to add it in the first post.


It's too late for Spellborn to go Opensource now. Almost no-one cares about the game anymore. If you want to bring it back, you'd better come up with a fully fledged marketing campaign to succesfully relaunch the game.

well then maybe this is some good news

http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/01/26/...n-the-way/

well then maybe this is some good news
http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/01/26/...n-the-way/

Unfortunatly, that news is over a year old, back then Acclaim was still in business.

Giving away the SDK wouldn't be an issue, btw, because Epic already did that

The UDK, or Unreal Development Kit is free for all to use (with licensing).

Both offices listed as 'spellborn' (nv, works, etc) are for sale!
KVK - Kamer van koophandel - Information service on all registered companies in the Netherlands lists:


De Bruyn Kopsstraat 14, 2288ED Rijswijk ZH


And:


Laan van Vredenoord 1, 2289DA Rijswijk ZH

Neither of these addresses are actually working addresses. They were just registrant addresses. We were at the Gevers Deynootweg from 2006~2009 (there was an old Khaeon address before that, but hardly relevant now). All the stuff that was in the office has been put in container storage somewhere in 2010.


Of course Spellborn NV doesn't go "open source", they invested a big wad of cash in this project and prefer to sell it, rather than throw it out on the streets. That stands before any other issue.

Ah.. That's the problem, they want to sell something no-one wants to pay big money for, because it's (frankly) outdated in graphics (style is awesome, but tell that someone you're trying to sell a game to), has an odd combat system, is hard to implement as F2P game (because items have no stats, the only thing I could think of are sighils and Ping lowering Potions), is buggish.. The value is lowering every month, because the graphics get older and older.

There would be plenty of stuff to sell:

Teleport scrolls to the next village, Special extra cool looking armor, weapons, Sigils, Rings, Potion stuff, how was this 0-5-buff-thingy called? +1 Potion for that, or a saver potion so you don't lose a rank on your next death. Plenty of stuff.


Also open sourcing isn't just putting the code online and be done with it. There is actually a bit of work involved, which someone had to do for free, and the other thing is: If they open source it, would there actually be someone that can and want's to pick it up and do something with it?

Is anyone here that actually feels up to the task to put that stuff on a server? There won't be much documentation, and there won't be anything remotely like a simple one click installer.


Think of it this way: Imagine you have an old bike that you want to sell, and you think it still has some value. Now a buyer tells you: I only take it for free!

Would you give it away for free? Probably not. Maybe only to someone who is a friend.

I know what my reaction was if someone told me he only takes it for free: I'd rather threw it away.

I still hope that somehow, somewhere, sometime, the game server files will leak on the internet and people will be able to host private servers of their own.

Hi there,

Some of my guildies and I. have been studying the spellborn files.

Some of our latest achievements:

- read out and extract some textures out of the unreal files.

- read out and extract speach and sound effects (not with all the additional info like sound locations and if they are stereo or mono...). We managed just to create plain wav files.

- comparing different versions of the clients (you'll like to know this: version 0.9.0.0 of the eu beta client doesn't have gameguard. we found it via google) With this version, if you start the sbclient.exe you can manage to get up to the login screen. Seen there are no live servers to register or login, one could try to create a database for the login process, but that is not my forte. For the rest I guess we would need the unrealed 2.5 but can't seem to find it anywhere.

I hope this can give some leed to our possibilities.


One last thing: none of our guildies will ever make the gathered data available without the license nor try to create a client. Reverse engeniering is not allowed by the copyrights, and we respect that.