Update: Lining Up Next Target

[Lily Barclay]

can we hold off on this a little while? at least until disney gives us a response?

Disney won't respond to us, even if they are interested.

[Ironwolf]

I agree - if Disney is interested they will talk to NCSoft and we will never know until they buy the game and announce it.

If they choose not to buy the game - it will likely never get past a VP who is given the package and he hands it to his team who look at it and decide if it's viable. They may or may not bite. It would be better to find a single investor who is interested in the property. It may be a person who wants American property and this lets him expand and invest regardless of actual profit. Some people just want a foothold in an American market - similar to NCSoft.

NCSoft tried to gain a little legitimacy in our market and failed miserably. Another investor from an oil rich area or other non-IT background may see this as a way to spend $7-10 million and get a nice tax write-off and maybe recoup the purchase over 3-4 years. If I hit the Lottery and bought the game I would consider it a $10-12 million investment over 4 years. You have to figure what can I get back for my money?

What rate of return?

I would say you could host the game and man a studio for new content for $3 million a year. Drop another $1 million a year for advertising and you could return likely costs + $2 million first year. How much after that for tying up $10 million? Got to be realistic here.

[houtex]

Could not agree more with that.  Realistic expectations for the returns are a problem that cannot be avoided here.  Nobody will spend a dime if there's not a reasonable expectation for more than just break even or good feels(tm) about their doing it.

This is where Steam or a service such as that is a better idea, IMO, than Disney, but... there are a lot of good eggs around here. I am confident that their passion and saavy will sway potential investors into doing this...

Now we just got to get NCSoft to be despera... I mean, business oriented enough to actually, you know, sell the game.

---

For my part, if I were individually freakin' rich, I have mapped out how I'd save the game forever... frozen in it's I-23 state (NO beta... can't support that) and wholly owned by ME.  Well, a trust anyway.  I would buy the game for a non-ridiculous amount, find a place, buy an OC3 or 12 or 24 or whatever makes sense, and get it all up and running.  Pay a couple of people who can hack the client to fix the IPs/Server names.  Get it running client side.  Then maybe after that's working, get I-24 fixed up... and all that jazz thereafter.

And it would never, ever, stop working.  Because I'd be individually freakin' rich and would do that for me.  You guys would be a side product of win.

You find that investor, you're golden... again, as long as NCSoft says "ok."  Otherwise... The Phrase.  That horrible Phrase...

/Go Team Wildcard!  I believe!

[Jade77]

Anyone know of any bored arab's with money to toss around indiscrimanently?  lol

[Blue Pulsar]

RL needs a "That name is reserved.  Would you consider 'Djohn'?"

I kinda thought of 'Dijon' mustard.

[Osborn]

<sidetrack>

Several years ago, I bought a MacBook Pro, downloaded Xcode, and intended to write some widgets related to City of Heroes (among a few other little iOS app ideas I had in mind). Once I got everything set up, I started learning Objective C and details of how to program for the iOS GUI. I got knee-deep into it and was really close to releasing something, so I sent my $99 to Apple to join their developer program so that I could actually publish stuff.

They e-mailed me back and said that they needed a copy of some official ID to prove that I am who I say I am.  "That's weird," I thought.  What difference does it make?  It's not like Apple has to fill out tax forms for me or anything.  And when I was signing up, it never told me that I'd have to provide any identification, but still, whatever.  So I made a copy of my driver license and snail mailed it to them the next day.  A few days later, I got another e-mail from them saying that they required a notarized copy of my identification.  Again, nothing in what I signed up for or in the first e-mail said this.

This was at the same time that Apple was clamping down on a lot of developers.  Daily, I read stories on Slashdot about people whose apps had been pending approval for weeks or months.  Also, some high-profile apps had either been denied or pulled, including Google Voice, a Commodore 64 emulator, and it was around the same time also that Apple declared that all apps had to be developed in Objective C, screwing over Adobe and Mono in the process.

So after I got the second e-mail, I thought long and hard about it.  Do I really want to subject myself to the walled garden that is Apple?  In answer to that question, I sent them back a reply asking for my $99 fee back, along with telling them that as a developer, I wasn't going to put up with these hoops.  If I had this much trouble just to push out a couple of widget apps for free to my friends, I was inclined to believe the other developers who were complaining about Apple's draconian approval process, and I didn't want any part of it.  A couple of months later, I sold my MacBook Pro, and I haven't looked back.

I might work on some Android apps, but if anyone else wants stuff developed for iOS, they're going to have to find someone else to do it, someone who has more patience for those types of shenanigans than I have.

Oh, and just for the record, Objective C is hideous.

</sidetrack>

So what were we talking about?  Oh right, Google!  Let's do that!

I think what mostly turned me off of their app store (though in the fairness of full disclosure I had an icy relationship with Apple to begin with. Me and their products haven't gotten along since the early 2000's), was them stating that in their development guidelines that if you want a game that tackles anything remotely adult, like religion, you should give up and write a book, because parents are too lazy to set up parental control but also too lazy to monitor what their kids buy, which was basically flash back to the 1980's era Nintendo guidelines.

So I can't blame you for not jumping through legal hoops that are, frankly, intrusive, just so you can develop an app for free.