Kickstarter for commercial game licenses?

[quartercast]

Having to root open device kind of doesn't make much sense, does it?

I agree it's a bit ridiculous, but sometimes we need to be reasonable and accept things can't be 100% to our liking or ideals.

Pandaboard officially supports Angstrom, Ubuntu and Android, I don't see why we can't either.

Yeah but does that have Google's blessing, can it run Market/Play out of the box? Even if it does, it doesn't mean much for us since we are not TI and google won't care about somebody as small as us, just like TI is treating us now (almost no help or support of any kind).

Apparently it does have at least part of Google's blessing.

As to whether Google will care about someone as small as us... well Google was small once too


We may be small, but we are truly unique and persistent.


Has anyone looked into or contacted Linaro?


They have a membership process which can be joined (for a fee) to provide access to their engineers and other resources. They have a How To posted on their site as well.


Maybe our kickstarter could be used to fund a Linaro membership application, and their engineers could port Android for us. That would kinda solve the "what dev?" problem.

 

[Grench]

I stumbled across the following project on Kickstarter today:


http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1067367405/pinball-arcade-the-twilight-zone


Basically, the company behind the Pinball Arcade game wants to include the Twilight Zone pinball - but the licenses are damn high.


So they're trying to get enough money for the licensing through Kickstarter... and that made me wonder:


Should we try the same with the Pandora and some commercial (or Indie) game titles?


Based on community wishes I could contact the company for a game, negotiate license costs and try to use Kickstarter to get it, so we can port it.


What do you think?


Worth a try?


Of course, only games that would run on the Pandora without major problems should be licensed

Back on topic - how viable this is will depend on how much a license costs and how many people are willing to fork over the $$ to make it happen.


High end commercial software is going to be very expensive. However, it would also hold the most interest to the most people - who would be more likely to put larger $$ towards it.


I'm a broken record on this - but I'd like to see Neverwinter Nights (Diamond/Ultimate) ported from native X86 Linux to the Pandora. It would fit the Pandora's controls perfectly - run with the left nub, highlight the target with he right nub - use the keyboard as a whole pile of action keys. It is still played actively by thousands of people - has essentially infinite content, is continuously expanded by the user base, is a MORPG (Not MMORPG) as well as a stand alone game.


The first step, though, would be for ED to contact the relevant company and get a firm price on how much it would cost to get the license to use the original source code. For NWN the biggest issue is likely to be figuring out who to contact then getting a response out of them.


But if it's possible - this could be a 'killer app' for the Pandora.

 

[Filz]

It would be great to have some more multiplayer games on the pandora! There are a lot well kown games with low hardware requierments.


C&C


Age of Empires


StarCraft


...


I would love to play vs. other pandora users!

 

[Binky]

I suppose there is a relevant zone between things that could be done with emus, and things that couldn't be run natively...

 

[Grench]

It would be great to have some more multiplayer games on the pandora! There are a lot well kown games with low hardware requierments.


C&C


Age of Empires


StarCraft


...


I would love to play vs. other pandora users!

I agree - more multiplayer is a great idea. Better still if the Pandora were able to log into existing multiplayer servers - and play with/against players on standard machines.


Look at the Quake series for example - we have them (more or less) running on the Pandora, but they're in a quasi proof of concept state. If they were able to connect out through an internet connection and play on multi-player servers - that would be VERY cool. Q2 and Q3 need to get their stability and controller issues solved. (If they already have been solved - someone post up a link please?)


I'm crazy on Neverwinter Nights - but to me the biggest draw for that game is it's multi-player online experience. Would I buy a $60 native ARM version for my Pandora? In a heartbeat - but I'd pay $100 for a native ARM version with full multi-player support with all the add-on packs & CEP & PRC working. I'm an extreme case on that particular game though.


These Kickstarter funds for commercial games - there would have to be some sort of expectation level - how much of the 'real' game should we expect to get on the handheld device?


Also - add Duke Nukem 3d to the list of possibles to get licensed/ported?


Does anyone else fondly remember the game Redneck Rampage? That's a 1st person multiplayer shooter that might be cheaper to license - but still big fun.


Getting some older big games licensed and compiled from source is a great idea - hope it works.

 

[mcobit]

Duke nukem 3d is playable already with the opensourceport, but of course a version with 3d acceleration and other stuff would be cool.


Redneck rampage uses the same engine like duke3d btw.

 

[Grench]

I just had another thought...


There have been some articles on Engadget about Valve working on a native Linux X86 version of Steam - potentially with native Linux compiled versions of their games.


I wonder if they've ever considered compiling that for ARM.


Steam is about as far from opensource as you can get. However, it is convenient and the whole original Half Life and derivatives series should run in low graphics mode at 800x480 quite happily if compiled natively.


Now - if you can stomach that kind of relationship with a big IP game company - think of how many Pandora units could be sold if they were to become the official hand-held mobile gaming device for the Steam store.


Yeah - it's OK to dream right?

 

[Grench]

Duke nukem 3d is playable already with the opensourceport, but of course a version with 3d acceleration and other stuff would be cool.


Redneck rampage uses the same engine like duke3d btw.

Really? Cool - I'll need to go digging around and find my original install disks for those to get the binarys from. I've only moved 3 times since I last played those two games.

 

[Klumpen]

Basically, the company behind the Pinball Arcade game wants to include the Twilight Zone pinball - but the licenses are damn high.
So they're trying to get enough money for the licensing through Kickstarter... and that made me wonder:
Should we try the same with the Pandora and some commercial (or Indie) game titles?
Based on community wishes I could contact the company for a game, negotiate license costs and try to use Kickstarter to get it, so we can port it.
What do you think?
Worth a try?
Of course, only games that would run on the Pandora without major problems should be licensed

Would be great for native Pyra ports.

 

[comradekingu]

I wonder whos going to want pyra-ports that don't own a pyra?
Which is to say, is kickstarter the place for pyra-specific ports?

I would pay good money for GPL-ing of old games. I don't care if the assets are on a pay-per game basis.
Additionally I still think its a good idea to stay away from kickstarter, since it incurrs cost, and that bringing people around these parts is good.

So maybe talk some game-makers of old games, where there are few people to talk to, get them to agree with a Pyra-bundling of their game. Whatever it costs, we crowdsource here. Then they can sell their game later on the repo and/or enjoy and take part in bugfixes and updates.

Can even poach things off kickstarter. 4.5k gets you for example.

I'm more for funding current people than sinking money into some license-owning company.

To really document something for the future, good games don't get worse.

Indiehoho, hustle hustle.

 

[Klumpen]

I would pay good money for GPL-ing of old games.

So would I, even better would be realistic copyright laws though which make software fall into the open domain faster.
Making the source code itself freely available would probably need a big financial motivation for the companies which ate the studios whole that had the rights to the old gems and even then many of it seems to have been lost, probably did go into EA's trash.

 

[LuSimon]

I'd pay everything that exists to get the Source engine games to run on a pyra (Half Life 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead...), but that is close to impossible.
I would absolutelly love if we could get our hands in Dont Starve on the pyra, or maybe (but that's a stretch) Get the Stalker games on the pyra would be a class act. Both games have Engines made "in-house" and are DRM free, so...

 

[lukey]

I'd pay everything that exists to get the Source engine games to run on a pyra (Half Life 2, Portal, Left 4 Dead...), but that is close to impossible.

There was Half Life 2, EP1, EP2 (and Portal?) for the Nvidia Shield. And with the OMAP5 supporting VM's it could be possible to Pretend an Shield to the Android and Apps inside the VM. Or Patching them to Work together with Apkenv. I think that Needs lots of hacking tough.

 

[shaddim]

Get the Stalker games on the pyra would be a class act. Both games have Engines made "in-house" and are DRM free, so...

the engines for two stalker games are out in the wild:
https://github.com/OpenXRay/xray S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky
https://github.com/OpenXRay/xray-16 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat
[doublepost=1473274921,1473274747][/doublepost]

Making the source code itself freely available would probably need a big financial motivation for the companies.

This is one thing which should be fairly easy to explain to them: the community does the work (fixes, ports maintainance) and you can sell it on gog / steam.
Win-win!

And we have examples: arx fatalis, Doom, Duke Nukem, Falcon 4 etc etc a bunch of... source code openess is nothing to fear, the value lies in the assets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games_with_available_source_code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unofficial_patch (many of the recent commercial re-releases like titan quest happily included the communities patching work... the community does the work for the companies for free if you let them!)


PS: another hint, Descent III source code, currently not in wild is in the hands of Rebecca Heineman who seems willing to open source.
Also Stephen Kick from Night Dive, who tracks already games and source code down, is willing to open source

 

[shaddim]

strangely, just an opportunity cropped up

https://globenewswire.com/news-rele...-Wedbush-Securities-as-Strategic-Advisor.html
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/interplay_announces_sale_of_its_ip

September 07, 2016 12:10 ET LOS ANGELES, Sept. 7, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Leading video game software developer, publisher, and licensor, Interplay Entertainment Corp., today announced a process to sell its library of video game assets and intellectual property. The expected sale represents some 70 titles and dozens of characters. "Interplay has entertained millions of players with its well-recognized games, including Earthworm Jim, Freespace, Giants, Kingpin, Messiah, MDK, Run Like Hell, Sacrifice, Battlechess, Clayfighter, Dark Alliance, and Descent."