Legal Considerations and Challenges

[Luna Eclypse]

Just wanted to chime in on the "Phoenix City" thing several pages back and the potential for action from Marvel against the use of that word... how about "Paradigm City?" Still keeps the "PC" initials too.

[Flying Code Monkey]

Just wanted to chime in on the "Phoenix City" thing several pages back and the potential for action from Marvel against the use of that word... how about "Paradigm City?" Still keeps the "PC" initials too.

I assume (?) someone must still own the rights to Big O, and it's characters/setting, including Paradigm City.

[Enson Red Shirt]

I have been saying non profit would be the way to go and the pr would be great
not too long ago a group of friends and i were sick of donating to seti@home because berkley too 10% right off the top so we stareted donating servers and eventually formed it into a nonprofit within 3 months it was very cheap to doand you do not have to wait for the non profit status to kick in to start doing business people just cant write it off untill the paperwork is pushed thru now people donate to our non profit and we donate it as equipment so seti@home gets 100% instead of 90% you can start an llc for about 199.00 if you do the legwork also once you have the company you can do a merger with a clean shell company on the otcbb markets and use stocks and investors as a way to bring in needed capital all told can be done for under 40k if your smart about it i always keep a couple sole propriatorships sub chapter s and llc's on the burner if i need a new company fast

[Segev]

Nonprofits are not good for running ongoing products. The reason it works for your SETI donations is that you are literally asking for money as donations to support a project that donates server time to SETI. It is, effectively, a charity (albeit one for knowledge and research rather than people in need of life-preserving sustenance and shelter).

Asking for donations to a game won't work so well. Making people pay will, but better if you can monetize it in a "free to play" like fashion, as we've seen that that's a more reliably profitable scheme. The problem with a nonprofit is that it is both deceptive and under tremendous conflicting regulatory requirements. They can't, first and foremost, make a profit. However, they pay all their employees, including their CEO and other executives, and can pay them very well. But they can't pay them bonuses beyond a certain amount. And if they're netting a profit, they can only re-invest so much before it counts as violating their non-profit status.

In effect, non-profits struggle, when they're trading a good or service for money, to make enough not to go out of business but not so much that they are suddenly making a profit.

For-profit dodges the sillier of these "problems" by simply acknowledging that profits mean the product/service is desired and worth continuing to give.

[TimtheEnchanter]

I think the best option here is to make it a profit game, but with a pre-WoW business model for managing it (which in the minds of modern gaming companies, IS a non-profit game).

That means accepting it as a niche game, that will 'probably' never see a soaring population, and keeping costs low enough so that the niche population is all you need. If something amazing happens with the consumer reaction, then the operation can expand, but we can never lose sight of the fact that insane profits are not the primary goal.

[Segev]

I'm not sure what you mean by "pre-WoW business model." Please elaborate?

[Aggelakis]

I'm not sure what you mean by "pre-WoW business model." Please elaborate?

Millions of players meaning multi-millions of dollars to invest back into the game.

[Segev]

Okay, and by contrast, a "post-WoW business model" would be...?

[Enson Red Shirt]

i see no problem running it as a non profit model pay the staff pay the rent donate to charities like i said great pr

[eabrace]

Millions of players meaning multi-millions of dollars to invest back into the game.

Yeah, that.  Before WoW, you were doing pretty good if you managed to capture a market that even approached what CoH did.  Post-WoW, anything that can't beat WoW's numbers has been considered unsuccessful.

Let's face fact here:  WoW is an anomaly.  I'd even go so far as to say that WoW is an anomaly within the realm of anomalies.  The minute someone starts comparing your subscriber numbers to WoW, you're toast.

"We're going to dump hundreds of millions of dollars into this new MMORPG we're developing because WoW has shown us that we'll get all of that money back and then some."

[TimtheEnchanter]

Okay, and by contrast, a "post-WoW business model" would be...?

If the game doesn't have 500,000 (in some cases, millions of) players (to support the unbelievable amount of money being dumped into development and marketing), it's an epic fail to be taken out behind the shed and shot.

Just take a look at EQ as an example. In its heyday, EQ was a stunning success. In fact, it was the standard. If an MMO with that amount of success were made today, it would be an industry laughing stock.

[Aggelakis]

Okay, and by contrast, a "post-WoW business model" would be...?

Before WoW, having 100k subscribers was pretty great.

After WoW, having 100k subscribers is a huge disappointment.

[Enson Red Shirt]

dont know how many of you are in the south florida region i wont be there at the time of this meeting but if someone wants straight forward answers to what can be done feel free to take my invitation from one of my stock transfer agents



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[Segev]

i see no problem running it as a non profit model pay the staff pay the rent donate to charities like i said great pr

The problem with the part I bolded is that you can't do that beyond a certain point. I worked for a not-for-profit co-op a couple of years ago. A friend of mine still does. They periodically have a major, serious problem in that they cannot find enough legal places to spend the money they take in that is greater than their raw operating costs and are in serious danger of punitive fines that would take them from being "illegally profitable" to "having to lay people off."

Not-for-profit laws have a cap on how much you can pay employees, how much you can spend on "perks," how much you can donate to charities...the laws around them are grotesque because the only actual incentive to being one over being for-profit is tax-avoidance. The one I worked for also had a second imperative: stay not-for-profit so their customers would keep working with them, but that was a very specific market circumstance based on having a very specific customer set.

CoH is best served by a for-profit entity devoted to making the best game it can. If the owners want to donate profits to charity, that, too, is good for tax purposes and comes off as more generous because they had the option of keeping the cash.


As for "comparing to WoW," that's an idiotic thing to do. WoW is the industry LEADER. You might use them as a goal, but never assume you're failing if you aren't beating them. That's like assuming that every swimmer who isn't Micheal Phelps has failed at swimming. >_<

[Enson Red Shirt]

http://www.nonprofitexpert.com/faq/q1.htm

[eabrace]

As for "comparing to WoW," that's an idiotic thing to do. WoW is the industry LEADER. You might use them as a goal, but never assume you're failing if you aren't beating them. That's like assuming that every swimmer who isn't Micheal Phelps has failed at swimming. >_<

You'll get no argument from me on that point.

Problem is, investors in MMORPGs over the last 8 years or so haven't been smart enough to figure that out for the most part.  Now that they finally are figuring it out that WoW captured lightning in a bottle, you're seeing far fewer MMORPGs in development because investors who didn't get it and were just looking for "get rich quick" schemes have mostly been weeded out and taken their money on to what they think is the next big thing.

[TimtheEnchanter]

The best thing that this conceptual company could do regarding WoW is: whenever asked any questions about WoW, say, "We don't base our success on the success of WoW or any other game. It isn't a factor."

Though, I think just the idea of a company that is building a game based on the old way of doing MMO's, will at the very least attract the interest of a lot of gamers. There are so many who hate what MMO's have become since everyone became single-minded-ly focused on the illusionary WoW gold rush (it utterly murdered creativity, experimentation, and innovation), that even if the superhero genre isn't their thing, the company will still earn their respect.

[Segev]

Okay, because I'm still puzzled, when people are saying "don't get on the WoW gold rush" or similar, they're basically saying "don't make a WoW-clone?" Or is there something specific to the way WoW makes its money that they're talking about?

[TimtheEnchanter]

Okay, because I'm still puzzled, when people are saying "don't get on the WoW gold rush" or similar, they're basically saying "don't make a WoW-clone?" Or is there something specific to the way WoW makes its money that they're talking about?

No, it's not about HOW WoW makes it's money. Just the amount of money. Corporations don't think in the small scale with MMO's anymore. Everything has to be in the millions, if not billions. Ginormous customer base, ginormous funding, ginormous marketing, etc.

As for clones though... even dev teams that aren't intentionally cloning WoW, tend to be very skiddish at straying very far from that template. It's just how investors think. Everyone is afraid of doing something that hasn't already been tried and proven. There are a couple exceptions, but they're a tiny minority.

The WoW gold rush though, is the idea that anyone can make an MMO, get 10 million subs, and make billions from it. This idea has somehow been so ingrained into the business consciousness, that they pump tons of cash into developing a game, assuming they'll earn it all back (I'm looking at you, EA/Bioware). What somehow almost nobody in the biz realizes is, that goal of achieving what WoW did is completely unrealistic. WoW already had an unbelievable fanbase due to the Warcraft games. Blizzard has always been very loyal to their fanbase, and earned the trust of the players before they ever made WoW. And most importantly, WoW attracted people who previously weren't playing an MMO; a LOT of people. Today, more or less everyone who is interested in MMO's is already playing one. There is no untapped resource to draw on like what WoW did. If you want to gain those numbers today, you have to usurp the subs from other games, which isn't as easy, no matter how great your game is.

[Luna Eclypse]

I assume (?) someone must still own the rights to Big O, and it's characters/setting, including Paradigm City.

Well... shows how much I pay attention. I completely forgot about that show and wouldn't have remembered the name of the city even if I hadn't.

It would be nice to have a similar name to Paragon just out of homage though. Legal action wouldn't amount to much in pursuing a lawsuit against us if its just similar and the city itself looks nothing like what's in CoH.

What about "Pinnacle City?" Is that in something else copyrighted I can't think of at the moment? I'm sure the Pinnacle players would get a kick out of it. The zones within the city could just be named after our server shards as a tribute.