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 Alkasyn wrote:
Ye, many people are misjudging what Valve does. They are a greedy company just like the rest of them.

I see it's still hip to hate on Valve because of reasons.

People would do well to realize that while Valve are there to make money, they consistently do so by providing value to it's customers, not skinning them to the bone at every turn. Calling them greedy leaves you with no vocabulary to describe EA or Activision.

Linkdead wrote:
Up for sale are original IP. Saints Row, Company of Heroes, Darksiders, Homefront, and Metro.

Metro is not a THQ owned IP. They're just publishing it AFAIK.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 ph34r wrote:
DoW3 means whoever buys the DoW franchise. GW has no control over that. What you say is fine and dandy and true but does not change my point.

I'd say they would have control over who ends up with their IP license. And your point was about not being able to control what platforms the game would be on:

"How would GW have any control over what platforms games made by another company end up on?"

Which they absolutely would. If they said they wanted a Mobile game, and would not grant the license otherwise, then by the Emperor that company's gonna make a mobile game (or nothing).

Whoever buys DoW is gonna make it not mobile or mobile at their discretion. If the company already has the license it is generally out of GW's hands. A NEW game, that's obviously a different story.

 ph34r wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

 ph34r wrote:
How would GW have any control over what platforms games made by another company end up on?

"Hi. We're Games Workshop. We'd really like to expand our IP into the mobile space. Who'd like the contract?"

Like that.

You don't think GW went to Mythic and Relic and just said "Do whatever you want with it!".

DoW3 means whoever buys the DoW franchise. GW has no control over that. What you say is fine and dandy and true but does not change my point.

It depends on how the franchise and license works. I very much doubt Games Workshop would have their IP license allow the franchise to be sold with the rights to the Warhammer 40,000 IP. It's more likely the Dawn of War franchise will simply die because of this.

 ph34r wrote:
Whoever buys DoW is gonna make it not mobile or mobile at their discretion. If the company already has the license it is generally out of GW's hands.

You mean making the existing games available on mobile devices? Even that might be out of the question if GW lawyers have a tenth of a brain between them.

If anyone buys the DoW franchise, he'll most likely have the rights to re-release all existing games under their brand and that's it.

As an aside, (I hope) SEGA might be interested in getting both the publishing licence for existing games as well as Relic itself. They already have the WFB licence and rounding it up might be a good idea. They also seem to be handling Creative Assembly rather well, with the exception of the brief "no modding" period.

I'm honestly more sorry for Vigil and Darksiders. Awesome company and games. Hopefully Activision doesn't grab them.

I've already played an EA produced 40k game, it wasn't terrible.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Ugh, I hope EA doesn't get Relic, they always seem to crush my favorite developers (RIP Westwood) and I don't think I'd be a minority in seeing issues with Bioware since their acquisition (DA2's mess, the gigantic turd ME3 turned out to be, SWOTR collapsing, etc). But, that's life, it'll be what it is. I don't hold out much hope for seeing any Warhammer 40,000 games any time soon.

feth oath mate.

C&C 4 was a huge let down.

(I must admit, I enjoyed C&C 3 though - am I a bad person?.)

 -Loki- wrote:
It depends on how the franchise and license works. I very much doubt Games Workshop would have their IP license allow the franchise to be sold with the rights to the Warhammer 40,000 IP. It's more likely the Dawn of War franchise will simply die because of this.

It seems less likely to me that a company would be able to buy the DoW assets without being able to produce a DoW game.

 His Master's Voice wrote:
You mean making the existing games available on mobile devices? Even that might be out of the question if GW lawyers have a tenth of a brain between them.

No, what?

 His Master's Voice wrote:
If anyone buys the DoW franchise, he'll most likely have the rights to re-release all existing games under their brand and that's it.

If that were the case I imagine no company would care to buy any game franchise.

Well most game franchises belong to the company that writes or publishes them, so if you buy the company you get the game IP and can do what you want with it.

It's different when the IP is owned by a 3rd party and licenced either for a single game or series of games, or for a fixed time period.

It that case whether or not the IP transfers entirely depends on how the original contract was written.

If a company sells out/goes bankrupt the IP will often return to the original licencing company (in this case GW). IN that case nobody would be able to sell DoW atall as GW would have the 40K licence, but the software assets would be held by new owners.

Another reletivly common altternative would be completed, already sold material transfering to the new owner (as lomng as they did not modify it in any way so no new DLC or anything like that, so the new onwner could sell the existing DoW Stuff, but not release anything new

Only if the licence was written by an idiot (and GW has show itself to have some not too great lawyers) would the IP be able to be bought up and further developed by a new owner....

This is to prevent your competitors 'spoiling your IP' in the public gaze. Imagine what a malicious competitor could do if GW could not block it (again normal practive would be to have a big list of what can and cannot be done with an IP when you originally licence it)

Kill the emperor, introduce female space marines (again), produce 40K the homoerotic sex game, introduce pandas (oops sorry that's just too silly)

The company that buys Relic gets the DoW games as they exist now... but may not even retain the rights to publish them, given that neither Relic nor THQ own the 40K IP. GW owns that, and they license it out. They choose who has it and what they do with it.

 Scipio Africanus wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Ugh, I hope EA doesn't get Relic, they always seem to crush my favorite developers (RIP Westwood) and I don't think I'd be a minority in seeing issues with Bioware since their acquisition (DA2's mess, the gigantic turd ME3 turned out to be, SWOTR collapsing, etc). But, that's life, it'll be what it is. I don't hold out much hope for seeing any Warhammer 40,000 games any time soon.

feth oath mate.

C&C 4 was a huge let down.

(I must admit, I enjoyed C&C 3 though - am I a bad person?.)

C&C 3 was great, it was a faithful update of the original I enjoyed as a wee lad in 1995

I started C&C4 and put it down after 15 minutes. Haven't touched it since. One of the biggest letdowns ever (before ME3 at least )

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Scipio Africanus wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Ugh, I hope EA doesn't get Relic, they always seem to crush my favorite developers (RIP Westwood) and I don't think I'd be a minority in seeing issues with Bioware since their acquisition (DA2's mess, the gigantic turd ME3 turned out to be, SWOTR collapsing, etc). But, that's life, it'll be what it is. I don't hold out much hope for seeing any Warhammer 40,000 games any time soon.

feth oath mate.

C&C 4 was a huge let down.

(I must admit, I enjoyed C&C 3 though - am I a bad person?.)

C&C 3 was great, it was a faithful update of the original I enjoyed as a wee lad in 1995

I started C&C4 and put it down after 15 minutes. Haven't touched it since. One of the biggest letdowns ever (before ME3 at least )

EA is the lesser of the two evils (the other being Activision). EA at least, at times, tries creating new things. They go through phases. Activision is dead set on pumping out CoD every year, plus a few movie licensed games and the odd non-CoD game.

The DoW license will depend on the DoW license...and largely whoever ends up purchasing the asset which the DoW license might be tied to (would assume they plan on bundling some things up, though that will depend on the specific auction format as well).

Remember, if the new potential owner of the license doesn't want to pick up Relic as well - they likely would not have to. In the same way, they could say that they want Relic but think the terms of the license are crap and don't want to deal with GW.

There is no guarantee that the license would even survive the sales. There isn't a DoWIII even listed on the assets for sale at this point. Right now Relic has Company of Heroes 2 which should be ready for release in the next few months and a second game called Atlas which is currently in early development. Considering the development cycles - I would guess there isn't even much more than scribbles on a paper of what they might want to try for DoW III (which would be roughly 24 months out based on the available information).

In terms of who might pick up a majority of the THQ assets (ignoring the issues related to licensed properties) I would look at a larger media company who is looking to get more heavily into games for whatever reason. Warner Brothers, Fox and other large media conglomerates have often shown interest in owning video game design and distribution companies as well.

They have properties which can go both ways (movies based on games...games based on movies) and THQ would give them a turnkey ability to buy up a studio or two as well as the publishing channels which come with the distributor.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:

There is no guarantee that the license would even survive the sales. There isn't a DoWIII even listed on the assets for sale at this point. Right now Relic has Company of Heroes 2 which should be ready for release in the next few months and a second game called Atlas which is currently in early development. Considering the development cycles - I would guess there isn't even much more than scribbles on a paper of what they might want to try for DoW III (which would be roughly 24 months out based on the available information).

Which could mean because of its reliance on the 40k license, it's simply not for sale and will just die, unless GW managed to get in a clause where 40k franchises return to them in the case of the owner shutting down.

 His Master's Voice wrote:

 Alkasyn wrote:
Ye, many people are misjudging what Valve does. They are a greedy company just like the rest of them.

I see it's still hip to hate on Valve because of reasons.

People would do well to realize that while Valve are there to make money, they consistently do so by providing value to it's customers, not skinning them to the bone at every turn. Calling them greedy leaves you with no vocabulary to describe EA or Activision.

Linkdead wrote:
Up for sale are original IP. Saints Row, Company of Heroes, Darksiders, Homefront, and Metro.

Metro is not a THQ owned IP. They're just publishing it AFAIK.

I see it's still hip to be an uncritical consumer. See what I did there?

If the valid concerns I raised in my post do not worry you in the slightest, by all means, go throw your money at the screen..

And my vocabulary's perfectly fine, thank you. I called them all greedy and that's the word I'd use, but if you want a new word for today, try "avaricious".

Based on what?

They did L4D2 rather than the DLC for L4D that was promised... and then made some DLC for both.

They added paid-items for Team Fortress 2! The fiends. Wait... they're hats. Hats that have no bearing on game-play. Meanwhile they released class expansions that were free, and then they made the game free.

I know nothing about DotA, so I won't make any comments.


If there's one thing to fault Valve on its that their development cycle is glacial.

Only problem I had with Valve was that Steam might have given them a monopoly position on the digital distribution of games, but there's some "competition" out there now.

As for the infamous "Valve-time" I'd suggest you all read the Valve employee manual: http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

Valve handbook is quite funny. I love the (illegal) fights in the fish bowl.


And as far as digital distribution goes, the other services are crap. Like EA's Origin? And the feuds between Steam and Origin? Do we need those? I get that digital distribution is in its infancy and none of the companies really know what they're doing*** yet, but it seems that they're all scrambling over one another in a way that always leave the actual consumers out.

I said a while ago during the whole Street Fighter X Tekken fiasco that there wasn't going to be a war between publishers, retailers, developers and consumers because that war had already happened, and we lost. We're about to watch some of the fallout from that war - the big publishers tearing at the scraps of a company that didn't survive the war. I fear what may come out the other side.

(/melodramatic paragraph)
(/ominous music)



***It could be worse. They could be the RIAA and MPAA, two groups who have a worse track record than GW when it comes to adapting to changing trends and the power of the Internet.

Monopoly issues aside, this is going to damn me for saying it, but I trust Valve with Steam. And yes, the other services are utter gak. Origin is gak, Uplay is gak.

 Alkasyn wrote:
If the valid concerns I raised in my post do not worry you in the slightest, by all means, go throw your money at the screen.

Your valid concerns amount to off handedly mentioning two games (for whatever reason - I still don't know what happened to Team Fortress, except it being an exceptional experiment in promoting user created content), a comment about a failed piece of EU legislation and reminding everyone how other publishers are bad because when setting their prices on Steam they equate Euro to USD.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
They added paid-items for Team Fortress 2! The fiends. Wait... they're hats. Hats that have no bearing on game-play. Meanwhile they released class expansions that were free, and then they made the game free.

What put me off the game is that the non-hat upgrades - that do have bearing on gameplay - are free more in a theoretical sense than in actuality. The drop rates are not up to the task of allowing people to actually use the new guns, and the store means Valve doesn't really want to fix this problem.

EA would kill it. I don't trust them as far as I can throw them. I don't have much issue with Ubisoft doing it, their games have been pretty good recently, and are a European company who are likely to respect the IP. Their DRM is lightening up a bit lately too.

Uplay is still a pile of gak though.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Based on what?

They did L4D2 rather than the DLC for L4D that was promised... and then made some DLC for both.

They added paid-items for Team Fortress 2! The fiends. Wait... they're hats. Hats that have no bearing on game-play. Meanwhile they released class expansions that were free, and then they made the game free.

I know nothing about DotA, so I won't make any comments.


If there's one thing to fault Valve on its that their development cycle is glacial.

Log into the store on Team Fortress. You will see that it sells a lot more than hats. Not on the same level as some F2P MMOs, but still.

L4D was promised to be a long-term project, similar to TF2. Instead, we got a 2nd game that pretty much invalidated the first game less than a year after the first instalment. I don't care for a DLC for a dead game, which is what L4D became after the community migrated to L4D2, which should never have become a separate game.

DotA is just an evolution of the hats selling business model, where you buy a hairpin for one out of a 100 of champions for 7.99.

 -Loki- wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Scipio Africanus wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Ugh, I hope EA doesn't get Relic, they always seem to crush my favorite developers (RIP Westwood) and I don't think I'd be a minority in seeing issues with Bioware since their acquisition (DA2's mess, the gigantic turd ME3 turned out to be, SWOTR collapsing, etc). But, that's life, it'll be what it is. I don't hold out much hope for seeing any Warhammer 40,000 games any time soon.

feth oath mate.

C&C 4 was a huge let down.

(I must admit, I enjoyed C&C 3 though - am I a bad person?.)

C&C 3 was great, it was a faithful update of the original I enjoyed as a wee lad in 1995

I started C&C4 and put it down after 15 minutes. Haven't touched it since. One of the biggest letdowns ever (before ME3 at least )

EA is the lesser of the two evils (the other being Activision). EA at least, at times, tries creating new things. They go through phases. Activision is dead set on pumping out CoD every year, plus a few movie licensed games and the odd non-CoD game.

Activision is the worst thing that can happen to franchises, EA is the worst thing that can happen to developers.

Activision will bring in a second developer to pump out spinoff games for franchises. EA will take the original developer and turn them into a bloated corporate borg drone with a dead company culture to spit out games faster and faster until they eventually lay everyone off.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Honestly, I'd love Relic and Volition to go separate ways from DoW and Saint's Row just for the hope that this will lead to Homeworld 3 and Freespace 3.

Even though those two games are probably even more unlikely than Dark Cloud 2 2 at this point...

 MajorStoffer wrote:

Paradox? They don't have the money for a GW license, and they don't have the best track record with anything not EU/CK/HOI.

Money aside Paradox would be out, they still own MC & Chronopia, (Even if they did smother their rebirth in the crib for FF prepaint garbage). GW would kill any assignment to Paradox fast.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Ugh, I hope EA doesn't get Relic, they always seem to crush my favorite developers (RIP Westwood) and I don't think I'd be a minority in seeing issues with Bioware since their acquisition (DA2's mess, the gigantic turd ME3 turned out to be, SWOTR collapsing, etc). But, that's life, it'll be what it is. I don't hold out much hope for seeing any Warhammer 40,000 games any time soon.

I'd love to see a Warhammer Fantasy or Inquisition based roleplay similar to Mass Effect or Dragon Age.

you could milk the heck out of this franchise

you could make a game for each Legion, major war games, The Battle for Terra


and at $70 a pop plus options to buy extras = gold mine


if you could get an actual story like a BL book in a game, OMG would I become a game junky again

Imagine The Night Lords Trilogy as an Assassin's Creed style game


or a Space Wolves game or a mechanicus game, or one about the assassin clans

Maybe if it was a game that had absolutely zero playable Space Marines in it. Ciaphas Cain?

No thanks, his games will fall into the same format-written traps as the novels. Though he'd be ideal for a good old point and click adventure, only minus the illogical puzzles.

How about an original character just for the games? Preferably one going down the Mass Effect road when it comes to protagonist: Just a name, not a gender in specific.