13-03-2011, 11:20 AM -
Quote: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 It uses an outdated engine, with lots of bugs, has no real market position, no-one knows of it's existence.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.