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Daybreak Games has a License Agreement with Marvel According to EG7's Investor Report | MMORPG.com
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Daybreak Games has a License Agreement with Marvel According to EG7's Investor Report | MMORPG.com
Over a year ago rumors were swirling that Daybreak Games was in possession of a Marvel license, and that they may be working on a Marvel MMO. While it's rare that we work off of rumors that can't wholly be substantiated, in the Enad Global 7 investor presentation, it all but proves that either sometime in the past, or even currently, Daybreak Games acquired licensing from Marvel.
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They sent a cease and desist order to my elementary school cause a student painted a ugly af spider looking guy on one of the walls for a project that kinda but not really at all resembled Spiderman..
No way they would even be allowed to post this license agreement info if they didn't have some type of ACTIVE arrangement.
It would be super lame to throw in a Marvel license that they had in the past and 0% chance they could be dumb enough to do that cause it would take probably less than one work day for Marvel's legal team to contact them in a not very nice way.
How did we end up in a universe in which the only good Marvel games are singleplayer Spiderman games, while all of the multiplayer ones are exclusively comprised of virtual waterboarding devices?
Middle Earth Enterprises has given their Lord of the Rings online license for a set period (5 years at a time with 2 years added to negotiate a new licence if I remember correctly from older news).
Disney has a more 'no harm to the brand' attitude towards their IPs. Marvel Heroes Omega's license was pulled because the developer (Gazillion, right?) made quite a mess of the game and it's maintenance.
You also shouldn't forget that you can buy talent. Offer a good job at good wages and you'll have talented people who want to take it. How much EG7 is willing to spend here remains in doubt, but if they're willing to spend the money, they can buy plenty of talent.
The real question is what their plans are. Are they going to put all of the games into maintenance mode so as to reduce expenses and hope to make some money back before everyone leaves? If so, I don't see how they could ever recover the $300 million investment.
But let's suppose that you had a lot of money to spend and wanted to build a dominant company in the MMORPG genre. How would you do it? Ideally, you'd like to have a really good MMORPG game engine to build games on. But the problem with trying to build the engine first without any particular game in mind is that you'll do a bunch of things all wrong. You'll guess at what games want, guess all wrong, and end up with a lousy engine.
In programming, it's a lot easier to do things right the second time than the first. After you build something and see what goes wrong, redesign the whole thing taking into account what you've learned and do it right the next time. But you can't do that until after you've built and launched the game the first time.
If you happened to have several launched MMORPGs that had been made by very different development teams, then you could learn from what was wrong with their aging code bases and fold that knowledge into the design of a new engine. If you can build an engine with several games in mind, that can guide your decisions on what you need. If the same engine can handle EQ2, DCUO, LotRO, and DDO, then it would probably work well for quite a lot of other potential MMORPG designs.
So what they could do is to hire people to make a new engine that they'll port their old games to. Make the engine work on PC, Xbox One and later, PS4 and later, and if you really want to be ambitious, maybe even Switch and Linux. Use modern tools and make it scale well to many CPU cores, which a lot of older games didn't because they didn't realize it was going to be a thing when it started. Make it scale well to high resolutions, so that future gamers on 8K monitors can have the UI still look fine. Port your old games to it to demonstrate how well it works and maybe you'll get some licensing opportunities from other companies who want to make an MMORPG.
This would also give you a chance to bring old games to new audiences on the game consoles. One of the perennial problems with MMORPGs is having enough content so that people don't run out of content and quit. Older games have a ton of content available, so much so that you don't necessarily even need to release it all up front, but can add in the newer expansions in coming years.
Would it be profitable to do that? That depends some on whether you believe it's profitable to build new MMORPGs at all, and some on how well you do it.
So let's suppose that you're looking to buy several older but stable MMORPGs? Which company would you want to buy? Publishers that specialize in importing foreign games and attaching pay to win item malls that will soon chase most of the players away aren't the best choice. You'd like some more respected games that are likely to still be viable by the time you're ready to port the game to the new engine. Blizzard, Zenimax, and EA are major players on the MMO scene, but they're mostly known for non-MMO games, so they'd be way too expensive to buy. If you're trying to buy your way into the industry and build a dominant Western MMORPG company, Daybreak was probably the best opportunity.
You mentioned the problem of a lack of talent. Maintaining a 20 year old code base that was originally written by other people who have long since left really isn't a very attractive position for a programmer. You can make it attractive by offering sufficiently high pay and good work conditions, but that's expensive to do.
Having several years to build a new MMORPG engine using modern tools and then porting old games to the new engine would be a far more attractive position. If that's what you want to hire for, then offer competitive wages and working conditions and you'll have very talented people lining up.
Most likely no rumour, but they just said to have a license. It's not said they are actually developing...
Yes there can be many rules in the contract to a license.The game was being worked on in 2018 and cancelled that same year along with tons of layoffs.
DBG acquires SOE then immediately lays off lots of employees.3 years later and was working on a marvel licensed game but that same year cancels and lays off tons more.
When you keep laying off employees and cancel a licensed game it does not look like a business ready to expand.So it made ZERO sense they restructured into 3 new studios other than for business reasons and NOT because of gaming reasons.
I am seriously not that interested to find out much more on the license because as stated I don't want a Marvel game and this studio was dwindled down to a bare bones studio that really must have struggled just to make expansions for their games let alone make any new games.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
this is going back a while though
Daybreak Games has a License Agreement with Marvel According to EG7's Investor Report
but your not sure it's even current...Did you even try to talk to anyone at Daybreak or is this just some of the stellar "games journalism" we should expect around here?
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Your statement kinda suggests that it might be an active license..
If it's just a "remnant" license why not mention the Star Wars "remnant" license as well?
"No talent left" in your alternate reality must mean that they're able to release expansions/dlc for DCUO, LOTRO, DDO, E2, EQ like they've been doing for years now... How is it possible to create any NEW content at a speed that keeps their paying players happy if they no longer have "talent"?
Adding content to an existing engine and product is a far cry from developing a brand new MMO based on a very popular IP. I haven't been impressed with SSG that's for sure.
The entire investor report tries to make the acquisition of Daybreak look like it was worth buying.
Even if the Marvel license is current they might be making a mobile battle royale or more likely they might be doing nothing with it.
Personally I think that Daybreak doing anything noteworthy with any game/IP they have is pie in the sky and a new game from them would probably be a laughable failure much like Planetside Arena.
I'm also expecting any story with relevance or actual games journalism to be broken over at MassivelyOP.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/What you wrote below is pretty much why I chose this hill... I could really give 0 fuks even if this is a TC shell cause the rules of boarding come into play in this situation "a$$, ca$h or grass". They chose ca$h and it created some much needed movement in the MMO sphere. So much movement that there are even people here on a MMORPG site trying to downplay this somewhat historic MMO event.
"One of the perennial problems with MMORPGs is having enough content so that people don't run out of content and quit. Older games have a ton of content available, so much so that you don't necessarily even need to release it all up front, but can add in the newer expansions in coming years."
Every single DBG MMO they have up and running has stuck by the THREE C'S I use to determine a solid MMO experience...
1. Content - Lots of it & preferably replayable.
2. Character Progression - Meaningful & not instant.
3. Community - Does not need to be grabby but at least willing to respond with help. The way I judge a community is how they treat new players because new players in MMO's are the real world equivalent of pets, children & elderly. Care for them and they can possibly return the gesture tenfold.
"That depends some on whether you believe it's profitable to build new MMORPGs at all."
My personal opinion is that the best MMO's have already been made. To think anyone can start fresh and create decades worth of content like what exists in older games is IMO unrealistic. There's just no way to spend any amount of money and create decades worth of content even remotely similar to what was made by the talented individuals who worked on certain titles. I'd like to be proven wrong about this but one example after another has shown us that to make a gem of a MMO all the chips MUST fall exactly in the right place.
Right now I think the greatest untapped market is older games including those that were shut down. Five years ago if I told you Runescape OS would have a massive under 25 crowd or said that every decade old DBG MMO has tens of thousands of subscribers Kano would call me crazy and try to convince me Trion was the best company ever. Here we are though in 2020, Trion went bankrupt and either because of coronavirus and/or fate the younger generation is searching for something other than spoonfed shallow gameplay. At least provide them with options that organically lead them away from the loot box oriented brown stain in gaming history then we'll all win in the end.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/