To make this perfectly clear, as I think there is some confusion to the topic. The money in question here is a small amount of money that was not due until November 8th, weeks after their problems. Them trying to say September is just a shady way of trying to apply pressure on us, because the time frame for those royalties is the September sales which we are not paid for until the end of the following month, and which is then not due to them until a period of time after we receive payment. So any notion that their financial woes were caused by that payment is completely false. We simply refuse to pay them any more money until normal services are restored, which they have been aware of since November, as we'd never be able to recoup that money and because prior to the payment due date we already had to shut off sales.
Our viewpoint on this is if you pay for hosting a web store and one day your host tells you that your site can stay up, but it no longer can support sales. People can just browse it, that's not acceptable is it? Well what if you find out that you can no longer edit the site at all (no patches in our case), and if it has hardware failure there is nobody around to fix it? And then you are informed that you need to renegotiate your contract to pay additional money in order to keep the server running. Would you feel obliged to continue paying for this service if that meant that in a few months you would be out of money and have to fold shop? That's basically what has happened here. That is the situation that we were already facing when it came time to pay our bill. So we refused to pay it, and they said this would mean taking the alpha server offline, which we agreed to as keeping it up would require us to pay our staff and to pay server fees every month with no money incoming (which would sink us). We informed them we would pay the remaining balance in full when our services can return to normal, as well as offering options to help them secure an investor. Moreover they were aware of our decision a long time ago, and we allowed them to approve and tweak our shut down messages. So none of this is new. For their part they kept the alpha servers up longer than expected. We expected them to go offline at the end of November, but they obviously were hopeful that something may have been resolved by the end of the year and were trying to prevent any interruptions.
We aren't their backers, or their investors. We are a client licensing a service and we felt the service was not currently acceptable. We made that decision in the best interest of ourselves and our players, not because we don't want to help the situation, but because doing so would jeopardize us, as well. We can't take that leap of faith in them, though we are hopeful that they can find a solution.
For the most part things have been amicable between us. There was friction the past couple days, because we felt they threw us under the bus. Our primary obligation though is still to our players, and as a result of that we are still willing to work with Idea Fabrik moving forward to get the game launched. But in order for that to happen a proposal has to be made that won't sink either of us, and to date no acceptable solution has been found. We're giving them time to come up with something. If they are unable to and we can not find come to any other acceptable terms, we are prepared to go in other directions to getting the game to market, though that would be a last resort. Our game, and our players are what matters to us though, first and foremost. If we can aid Idea Fabrik in a way that doesn't jeopardize the Repopulation, we'll do it. But for example, if we had decided to keep the servers running, the costs we would have lost from then to now would have been roughly the amount of our original Kickstarter in server costs alone over two months, and that's without taking staff into account. Without money coming in, we simply can't fork out that kind of money while hoping they find an investor. It would be financially irresponsible for us to do so. That doesn't mean we aren't hoping they find a solution. Nor does it mean that we are turning our backs to them. It's just the reality of the situation.
Durf het bijna niet te zeggen maar Repopulation gaat dit niet meer te boven komen - jammer.
Is altijd jammer ja een game met zoveel potentie, dat door overmacht ten ziele gaat.
The Mandorine
Het is een kleine ontwikkelaar die gelooft in zijn eigen product. Je kunt nog versteld staan over de veerkracht om dit te overwinnen.
Geloof ik meteen maar in de gaming wereld is dat gewoon dodelijk.
denk dat er best nog wel een kans is ze zijn klein en erg zuinig met het geld dat ze hebben plus de bedenker kunne ook zelf programmeren alleen als ze naar een ander Engine moeten dan zal het zeker 2 jaar duuren voor je zijn waar ze nu zijn Groot voor deel is wel dat er niet zo veel mmo zijn als de repop
But back to my questions:
Is somebody able to give financial guesses and timeline for:
1: stay on HeroCloud, solve funding situation
2: buy source code (75k?, to royalities?) and develop without Idea Fabrik
3: switch to another engine?
Which of theses options are doable for ABT?
How can we help to realize?
I'd say that buying out, waiting for IF to solve the situation, and changing engines are all still on the table at this point. There is no 75k buy out option in our case though, due to the fact that we have an old contract with multiple amendments and have already been selling the game outside of Idea Fabrik (on Steam) and in testing for a good while. A buy out is an option though.
We're trying to keep things close to the vest at the moment, as we don't want to adversely affect other potential outcomes by putting all of our cards on the table. I would expect us to start clarifying and revealing our game plan some time this month though. What we want to avoid though is laying out our plans, and then having other options become available unexpectedly and causing them to change, or having those plans take other options off the table. We've been keeping busy though, just in as quiet a manner as possible. It should also be noted that part of the possible game plan does include a free gift to the community in an effort to help make up for these problems.
With regards to Unreal Engine. Several of us have been working with the engine since a couple of weeks after these issues began in an exploratory capacity, as we are wary of doing any more work in Hero Engine until these issues are sorted out but we wanted to keep team members connected. Making Unreal Engine MMO capable though isn't a trivial task. Making a 50-100 player game in Unreal Engine is quite easy. Going a step further and making it MMO capable would not be an easy endeavor, though it is possible. While Unreal Engine does have level streaming, those levels are all basically running on one server out of the box, and you would quickly run out of horsepower. So to do an actual seamless MMO would involve a significant amount of work to the server architecture. A zoned approach is more viable but you still need to do a significant amount of work to make the engine MMO ready. If we changed engines though, it would almost certainly be to Unreal Engine as the licensing terms are friendly, full source is available, and we are impressed with the engine. There are some cool things which would be possible in Unreal Engine which aren't really possible in Hero Engine, and that certainly is intriguing. And of course there are other areas (such as the needing to deal with SVN or GIT, and not being able to collaberatively design the world) where Hero Engine still shines over its competitors.
Though in all honesty, the idea of leaving behind 5 years of work to go basically back to ground zero is a pretty daunting task. We wouldn't want to go back to a Kickstarter, I just don't think it would be taken well to do so. But doing an engine switch would set us back 18 months at the minimum, so we would need to find a way to raise funds if we went that route, but a crowd funding campaign is very unlikely. We have years of work behind Repop already though, you don't want to just leave that behind, obviously. Not to mention players have been patiently waiting for the game for a while now, and the idea of asking them for two more years isn't really attractive. So while we are treating an engine switch as a legitimate option, our preference would be to get the Hero Engine based game launched. Whether or not that happens remains to be seen. As noted, all options are still on the table. We realize this is a pretty poor situation for everyone to be in. But please bare with us, stuff is going on behind the scenes.
denk dat er best nog wel een kans is ze zijn klein en erg zuinig met het geld dat ze hebben plus de bedenker kunnen ook zelf programmeren alleen als ze naar een ander Engine moeten dan zal het zeker 2 jaar duren voor ze zijn waar ze nu zijn groot voordeel is wel dat er niet zo veel mmo zijn als de repop
Yup dat zou wel eens het sterke karakter en kenmerkend kunnen zijn dat zij daardoor het wellicht kunnen klaarspelen.
The Mandorine
Ik hoop het echt voor de repopulation maar niks is zo grillig als game community want zij zijn degene die kunnen zorgen of deze game echt nog bestaansrecht hebben ook al is er dadelijk een nieuwe engine.
Dat is nieuwsbroef voor een heel ander game. ๐ Elite Dangerous.
The Mandorine
Overal en altijd plaats om met mooi Elite nieuws te spammen !
๐
The Mandorine
by J.C. Smith ยป Fri Jan 08, 2016 10:15 pm
As mentioned in another thread, we aren't quite ready to announce our plans just yet. But we will have an announcement later this month which will outline our plans moving forward. Wheels are already in motion but it's just not ready to be revealed yet. We don't want to leak out information on these forums before we are prepared for the full press release and such, because it would leak to the news sites once it is here. But to quell any panic, the game is not cancelled so that is not what the announcement will be.
Ik hoopt het beste voor de repopulation. Misschien verkocht aan Day Breaking Games ;)?