According to their press release. That is… unexpected. I wonder what this means for the future of the franchise?
Gearbox Software has prevailed as the highest bidder in the acquisition of the Homeworld franchise from THQ. Brian Martel, Gearbox Software’s Chief Creative Officer, has great love and respect for Relic’s brilliant, fun and innovative game and personally spearheaded the acquisition.
Brian intends as first priority to direct Gearbox’s interest to preserve and assemble the purest form of the original acclaimed and beloved games, Homeworld and Homeworld 2, with the intent of making them accessible on today’s leading digital platforms.
Well at least they’ll get the games on GoG then? I guess?
Does this include the excellent Homeworld: Cataclysm? I see no mention of it on the press release, and it was developed by Barking Dog Studios rather than Relic.
I really love Borderlands 2, so I’m gonna try to look at this as a positive development. I imagine they wouldn’t have gone after it if they didn’t think they could handle it.
This could be cool, it’s not like they are taking an unfished game and trying to wrap it up, which I believe has been their downfall in the past, right? I’ll keep an open mind. I also don’t have a lot invested (nostolgically speaking) with the Homeland franchise, but I do remember liking what I played of the first one. I think I’m more a Sins of a Solar Empire guy at this point, assuming my recollection of Homeland is right and they are similar in the RTS side of things (wasn’t homeland ONLY RTS?)
I’ll be highly surprised if Gearbox doesn’t drag this one to Kickstarter. Old, relatively well-known* brand with plenty of nostalgia going for it - see Torment or Wasteland. Or, to a certain extent, the stuff Chris Roberts and and Richard Garriott pulled off even though none of their games is actually called Wing Commander, Privateer or Ultima respectively.
As in: Still held in high regards these days, and many people know that it was this space RTS game even if they never actually played it.
Kickstarter is an interesting idea. They might be able to recoup a good chunk of the price they paid. I can’t imagine that IP going for more than $5-10 million, but maybe I’m wrong.
The total of the money exchanged in the latest auction was around $7 million. This included six lots of games. The first four lots were single properties (Homeworld, Red Faction, Darksiders, MX) and the other two lots were bundles.
The tragic auction was for Lot 6 which included some Total Fine properties that they had wanted to buy back, but they couldn’t afford to bid on the whole lot.
The $6.55 million sale of the IP assets breaks down as follows:
•$4.9 million from Nordic Games Licensing AB, a Swedish-based video games publisher, for Darksiders, Red Faction, MX vs ATV, Other Owned Software (includes Destroy all Humans!, Summoner and more), and Other Licensed Software (includes Marvel Super Hero Squad, Supreme Commander and more);
•$1.35 million from Gearbox Software, LLC, a Plano, Tex.-based developer of interactive entertainment, for Homeworld; and
•$.3 million from 505 Games Srl, an Italian video game publisher, for Drawn to Life and Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter.
So, I’ll say that it’s really interesting to see how little the big publishers cared about the B-tier titles from THQ. The prices for Company of Heroes and Saints Row were each easily four times the amount paid for all six of these lots.
Nordic, by the way, owns what’s left of Dreamcatcher and JoWood.
CoH and Saints Row have active development with games coming out this year. Red Faction, Homeworld, Darksiders, etc. were all properties without games or development.
They’d easily clear $1.35M with a Kickstarter. But I don’t know the economics of making that kind of decision for a big developer. I assume they have enough cash on hand to fund development themselves if they wanted to.
Hmmm… Well I don’t have much of an opinion on Gearbox (I saw Duke Nukem Forever mentioned in the other thread…), but I’d love to see Homeworld re-released. I think I still have HW2 on disc somewhere, but I made the mistake of loaning out my copy of HW1 years ago and I miss it sorely.
That game probably had my favorite RTS campaign of all time. I can still remember reading the backstory in the manual (the bit about exploring the deserts of their world, finding the tablet space map inscribed with one word, ‘Home’, etc.) The sketch-drawn cut scenes, music, and solemn narration were all brilliant. I still fondly reminisce whenever I hear Adagio for Strings.
Yeah, I was just wondering… Does anybody here have a sense for what exactly they’re buying when they buy these licenses? Is it merely the right to use the name, or are there actual assets included as well? (e.g., for Homeworld, do they get any sort of code base or art assets that aren’t available on the Homeworld CD?)
Sega were the last guys to give these bozos a pile of money. That dragged on for years and ended with Aliens: Colonial Marines. But hey, gamers are pretty dumb and nostalgia can cloud all things.
