My Lawyer Is Level 8

This its the high season for lawsues or something? Anyways, this could come for paranoia fom Turbine or Turbine has a spy inside Atari. Or internal drama completey unrelated, who knows?

To Turbine’s credit, I suppose barely anybody has heard about their attempts to relaunch DDO yet.

Still, I’d hate to see Cryptic crash and burn because Atari’s getting gouged for 30 million.

Well look what happened with those that lifetime subbed to Hellgate. Maybe Big Bill is trying to do you a favor here.

I like Cryptic, I have friends there, and I think they make some really fine products. However, I have a lot of sympathy for Turbine on this one, and on the surface it sure looks like they have a case. Their publisher stops supporting their product, then supports (or funds, or what, I don’t know) the development of a product using the same license at another studio, all the while asking Turbine to continue to put development resources (read $$$) into improving DDO.

Obviously the devil’s in the details, but I don’t think they’re going to get laughed out of court. On the surface, Atari’s behavior looks like bad faith negotiation. If you’ve got partner A developing a product for your IP, and partner B developing a competing product for the same IP, particularly without partner A’s knowledge… It doesn’t look good.

Sorry about the cruise control.

“I’m fine with Cryptic crashing and burning. They pulled a bait and switch with their lifetime offer for Champions online, and worse they have Bill Roper in charge. Hmm. He ran Hellgate: London, and that was a SMASHING success.

I’ve got a hell of lot more love for Turbine. I hope they crush Atari.”

1. The outcry over Cryptic having a limited number of lifetime accounts was almost entirely manufactured. That people would threaten to boycott a game because they couldn’t get a lifetime account for it makes my brain hurt.

2. Cryptic gave in, and made more lifetime subscriptions available.

3. The folks at Cryptic have nothing to do with the dispute between Turbine and Atari, and there is no just reason why they should suffer for it.

Some parts that are not inherently obvious:

Turbine wanted to switch DDO from subscription to F2P and their D&D license didn’t cover the change. They renegotiated with Atari and the end result was the license was no longer exclusive.

Atari is also not the owner of the license, they are sublicensing, so given that they also pay licensing fees, it starts to get a bit complex. The good faith parts start to become not so cut-and-dried given the obligations to the license that both companies have.

I’m at a loss to decide which company is being more evil here: The one that’s trying to milk as much as they can out of sub-licensing, or the one that’s trying to hold a court of public opinion to push a settlement.

Who knows, maybe Wizard’s of the Coast will decide all of the shenanigans are detrimental to the value of the D&D license and yank it away from both of them. Unlikely, but I’d probably applaud if they did.

I played DDO – I wouldnt say everyone agreed with your pronouncement that they wanted slow paced combat.
I think youre telling us what you and your friends wanted.

This is just one of life’s hard problems. Sometimes I wish life is like Math or computer system, everything can be well defined. But then it will be boring…

@Gx1080

I disagree on Cryptic having the resources to get both STO and a new D&D MMO off the ground. They barely got CO in the thin frame it’s in now. The only thing going for it is the character creator. The fact that they were offering closed beta access to STO if you bought a lifetime sub speaks volumes as to how little they care about CO’s long term success.

@Montague

Infogrames bought Hasbro and then rebranded itself to Atari (who they had bought previously). So Atari owns Hasbro, who own WotC.

Rog got it right. Hasbro Interactive is just the company that currently owns the license to create computer games and interactive media under the IP of Dungeons and Dragons. But the rights to D&D as an IP still belong to Hasbro. The license to make such titles runs out in 2015 I think. At that point Hasbro could give the license to someone else.

People really should read the court filing before forming an opinion:
http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/08/26/Atari.pdf

It’s not total legalease gibberish and easy enough for a layman to actually make sense of.
Admitadly it’s only Turbine’s side of the argument, but from the looks of it, a lot of people on the DDO forums that were ready to burn Turbine in effigy are rallyinng to them now.
Definately will be interesting to see Atari’s response.

Gx1080: I think you’re way off on your assessment of why DDO failed initially. Everyone I talked to that played it LOVED the combat. The main problems were these:
1) not enough content at launch. Level cap was 10, and to get there you had to grind the same dungeons over and over again. If they had randomized the trap layout or had some form of randomness to them that would have helped, but they didn’t.
2) Setting. First, they used the Eberron setting, which was only mildly liked in the first place, then they used a backwater portion of the setting that was completely undeveloped, then they limited it to just a single city with a couple small outdoor locations near. Epic Fail.
3) Grouping. At launch, once past the newbie harbor, you had to group for everything, there was nothing you could do solo to kill time. Also, the game screamed to be played best by having a regular gaming group (ie friends, rather than PUGs) do all the content together, and that’s pretty hard to pull off, especially when there’s nothing else to do while you waited to see if your friends would show up.
4) Whoever was responsible (Turbine, Atari, whatever) failed to promote and support the game big time. I remember when the game was first announced, there was a minor splash and it seemed like, hey, wow, those Turbine guys got a major license. Then just after that, they got the license to the (bigger) LotR license, and it seemed like they just yanked all their creative team off D&D to work on LotR, and DDO suffered for it. It became the MMO that time forgot.

(Ay, curse you, spam filter. Here’s the short version.)

Re: Champions Online

1. I think the people who complained about the discounted offers expliring had pretty good purchase to complain on the grounds that they received an email about “limited time” offer that suddenly turned into a “limited number” offer. It was probably just enough legal purchase that Cryptic decided to re-open the offer in unlimited numbers until Aug 31st, just in case.

2. It does worry me a bit that Bill Roper has apparently been handed the design reigns for Champions Online.

Long ago, Champions Online was based more on the Champions RPG system in that you had one central pool to purchase anything you want from: powers, advantages for those powers, or stat-boosting packages. Apparently, judging by Jackalope’s last dev blog (you can find on the appropriate section of the Champions Online website) this was boring.

Bill Roper was likely called in to rectify this situation, and to these ends he shoehorned in the system we see now. Three different power points: powers, advantages, statistics — all earned depending on what level you’re at. Powers are now on “tiers” which mean you either have to get sufficient level or purchase sufficient powers from the same category to earn the right to take.

I don’t like either change, I think they hurt the game’s overall flexibility, and if they were going to fix the game’s apparent boredom there was probably other things they could have done.

Nonetheless, I’m confident enough that they’ll eventually turn things around as to buy the box and a 6-month discounted subscription. It does rankle a bit, however, that I’ll apparently have to wait until Sept 1st to play the game because a Direct2Drive pre-order isn’t good enough for the pre-order head start. Has any game ever done that before?

Champions Online is a very *pretty* game, and considering the non-gamers severely outnumber the gamers in people who are playing games these days, it could very well be that Champions Online is a smashing success.

DDO was crap when it was released. It operates on a guildwards instance/hub system, which imo doesn’t actually count as an mmo in the first place, just a multiplayer game with visual lobbies. It also uses one of the worst campaign settings in the history of D&D.

When DDO dies, it won’t be from lack of advertising.

The thing for me about this topic is how subservient to a license games are now. I look at DDO and think Turbine should get credit for a lot of good things but honestly the license killed it for me.

I know a lot of you damn kids like new d&d but I think anything post early Gygax TSR sucks ass. And not just a little. That crap with feats and bs isn’t d&d neither does it translate to an MMO very well. I think Turbine did a great job on tough decisions where they could but it would have been a better game if they didn’t have to make them because of the license in the first place.

The proof is in the play. Everyone seems to think they need the marketing power of a huge license to do well despite all the evidence to the contrary. And that marketing often comes at the cost of design too. Big licenses are a red flag for me as a gamer.. the last thing I want is devs trying to convert IP from some other media.. games are hard enough as it is.

“d20 was the best thing that happened to the game.”

Yes.

Full Plate counts as plate!

Oh… forgot to mention.

One of the things that could come out of this is some kind of Benchmarking for Publishers with regard to Distribution and Marketing?
I would have thought this would have been included in contracts of this type because I cannot believe any Developer would work for years on a title and then hand it to a third party and say “You market and distribute it…kthx bye.” Particularly when your income and Return on Investment depends entirely on sales at that point?
But, what happened to FLS with regard to SOE/Platform Publishing and the European sales fiasco makes me think maybe it really is left up to the fate of the gods and the Publishing house?

It is possible to benchmark anything. I have been involved in both primary resources and construction and things change lots all the time but you can still benchmark if you are realistic.
Variations on contracts are commonplace but targets are still put in place and (mostly) met – even in the face of huge changes in conditions.

In this case you could say something like:
“At release a total of not less than 100,000 units will be made available for sale in Europe;
Not less than 25,000 in the UK (in English), 20,000 in France (in French), 20,000 in Germany (in German) and 10,000 in Spain (in Spanish).
Of which, no less than 20% of the UK allotment are to be offered for sale via retail outlets as per … ” etc.
“Marketing: Not less than 2 x A4 (Full Page) adverts to be run in local Computer magazines with a circulation of greater than 100,000 as per…. …to a value of…”
“Store displays are to include a display stand as per specification…”

Now your point about things changing is fair – but again you can write this into a contract.

For example:
“If suitable advertising cannot be obtained then total advertising to the value of up to US$20,000 shall be obtained in appropriate form as agreed by both parties…”

And there you have a contract agreement specifying what will be made available for sale at a minimum you can also specify at what point in sales print runs will be ordered for additional units etc.

Contracts can be written to protect both parties too.
So, if you have a Developer that wants 1,000,000 units distributed and a Publisher who doesn’t think it will sell then you can put in clauses that basically say ‘Okay we’ll do it your way… but if it doesn’t work then you pay for it.’
(A form of vanity publishing)

When a Developer finds themselves in the situation that FLS did with SOE/Platform Publishing when on the release day they cannot even say where the game is available and months later the best they can say is ‘we are pretty sure the game was released in Spain’ then something is wrong.
At the very least there should be records of print runs available showing how many units were produced and shipped.

In this case, I would expect Atari to be able to show up in court and say exactly how many units were made available for sale and exactly what percentage sold.
I guess we may be about to see how well the Computer Games Publishers and Distributers manage their business?

Thanks. I did read about how it works for DDO, but what I’m currently trying to get my head around( with the industry as a whole) is how many potential customers respond to this method of gradually becoming a subscriber in a F2P.
I created a FreeRealms character and ran around for a few hours last week. I found the style and the graphics to be superior to Champions and it was much more responsive to the player, but I didnt really see any other players and nothing ever made me want to pay money for something I didnt have access to.

I think that a F2P introduction is more or less equivalent to an on-demand free trial, but with reduced playability. Maybe it’s my perspective that gives me a bias against the F2P style or maybe it’s that not experiencing the premium content makes it easier for me to not desire it. I do usually find free trials persuasive(and open betas!)

@Sullee: I think the people who earn a living off the sale of D&D materials think it is worth the marketing bump – back when I used to visit it, my local nerd store’s best financial years were whenever D&D got a new update. 3rd Ed, then 3.5 Ed, now 4th Ed – every major D&D book keeps helps keep their doors open.

@gyrus: I agree on that, but you’ve outlined something that is probably much more sophisticated than a lot development studios think about. For someone like FLS, I’m sure signing on to SOE saw them happy that a major publisher was going to look after the marketing and they weren’t going to have worry about it.

For some studios, trying to get a publisher to actually put in writing what marketing activities they might do – potentially years in advance of release for MMOs – would probably make them untouchable. Unless your development studio has a lot of market power based on their history (and I’d say that Turbine doesn’t), studios usually have to dance to whatever beat their publisher put out for them.

I’m still not convinced that benchmarking in branded goods, especially several years out from release, is in any way helpful.
For example, twitter was pretty much a non-event 3 years ago but you’d almost certainly want it included in any marketing campaign these days. Similarly roll-over ads were huge a year or so ago but everyone hated them so much for expanding over the content that they actually came to view that they’ve been cut back a bit.
I just think the market is far too dynamic to warrant anything more than a “We’ll know bad faith marketing when we see it” clause, otherwise you end up doing inefficient activities because it was written into the contract years ago.

Gyrus, I agree with you, but from a dev studio point of view you don’t know what you don’t know. If a big publisher comes along and says, “Don’t worry about the marketing, we’ll look after it and it will be international” you’ll probably let them look after it while you do the hard work in getting the game out.

Studios don’t have a lot of power in these relationships. Often they go hat in hand to a publisher to obtain funding to keep the lights on so there is a chance they’ll make some money back. There might be studios who have the ability to scotch a deal if they don’t like the marketing plan, but there are plenty more out there who will worry about the bank foreclosing on their mortgage tomorrow if they don’t sign the deal.

Even after signing the contract, there is no guarantee of a publisher maintaining it. NCsoft cancelled their involvement in a Spacetime Studio title so that studio had to search around for someone else (who they found, but after several months of laying people off). There have also been entire studios destroyed in the stroke of a publisher pen as they lose all their development licenses that were funded as part of the contract.

For Turbine vs Atari, Turbine obviously has the cash to fund the lawsuit. Would FLS actually have enough capital to afford to go down this path should they think SOE reneged on their agreement? Because that’s the other challenge – although a company might have engaged in some questionable behaviour, you still have to be able to afford to take them to court on it.