[ndiddy]

Imagine if you were Atari. You've bought the rights to Transport Tycoon Deluxe from Chris Sawyer and want to sell the game up on Steam. Then you see OpenTTD (the exact same game except better in every way) also on Steam for free. What do you do?

[applfanboysbgon]

In the first place, the game is 30 years old. If the world had a sane copyright regime, it would already be in the public domain. Nobody should be particularly entitled to buying abandoned 30-year-old IPs and squatting on them to collect rent. All the more so when there would be no rent to collect if not for the derivative work being literally the only thing keeping the IP alive.

But let's suppose I am Atari and I have for some reason proceeded with buying said abandonware without doing my research. Upon discovering OpenTTD, I would hire the guy behind OpenTTD to work on a commercial version, keeping OpenTTD free to play but perhaps with some cool monetized expansion pack that would not have been possible without giving the developer the funding they need to work on it. That way I am making an investment in actually adding value to the game, and rewarding the person who kept it alive and in turn earning community goodwill, instead of investing in a shortsighted attempt to collect rent that backfires massively.

[freehorse]

> hire the guy behind OpenTTD

> commercial version

> monetized expansion

It is not clear to me whether turning (future evolutions of) OpenTTD commercial and monetising it is a preferable scenario for its community.

[applfanboysbgon]

I think it could be beneficial for players, if having a passionate developer able to spend more time working on it allows them to make future evolutions significantly better than they could be in a world where the developer only has time to work on it passively. That said, I am generally a proponent of indie game developers being paid for their work, as an indie game developer myself, so my personal bias may certainly leaking be leaking into my evaluation :)

I'd note it also doesn't need to be done in a way that deprives players of any free future evolution. Paradox has a nice model for their games where they release expansion packs, where about half the content is part of a free update to the base game and half the content is paid. That would be perfectly suited for a case like this.

[freehorse]

Not all people want to be paid for a hobby project, and not all game communities prefer having more "game features" with corpo backing. I am not saying one is better or worse, more moral or less, nor what is the case here, but it is not clear to me why this is a scenario that either the devs or the community prefer, as it was presented as "what atari should have done". I understand why many indie devs want to be paid for their indie games, but I don't want to assume that is the case for everybody with a hobby project.

[applfanboysbgon]

Well, yes. My main point was still about what Atari should have done. Atari buying rights to TTD is not guaranteed to be good for dev or community. But nonetheless, Atari should be trying to be doing something good for the community, good enough that they will pay it money so it can earn back its investment. That's how business should work, in a reasonable world: you create value for other people so they give you money.

[moggers123]

I go "oops I probably should have realised that existed before I decided to purchase the rights to and re-release a 999999 year old game which already has a GPL clone/spiritual successor/something".

I then go "well why re-release this ancient game running in an emulator, when this exists?" and ask the core team of OpenTTD if they want to monetize their steam/GOG releases now that I can licence out the TTD IP to them and remove any remaining legal ambiguity (and recoup my """investment""" via revenue sharing).

And if they don't I take it as a learning experience (to do my homework before I buy IPs) and release my TTD-in-an-emulator on steam and GOG knowing full well that its probably not going to generate many sales. Maybe I add "hey just so you know there's this really cool modern source port you can get for free..." to the description and hope that I can generate some sales off of good boy points.

[singpolyma3]

You put it up for sale and hope nostalgia sells something for you aka the original plan.

This argument is like "you buy a McDonald's then realize there is a burger king across the road. What do you do?" Yes one is a clone of the other. But you don't get to just bulldoze the burger king.

[rablackburn]

Seems like a pretty clear case of caveat emptor

[Suppafly]

>Imagine if you were Atari. You've bought the rights to Transport Tycoon Deluxe from Chris Sawyer and want to sell the game up on Steam. Then you see OpenTTD (the exact same game except better in every way) also on Steam for free. What do you do?

I'd do better due diligence next time and then write it off as having been a bad decision. It's not like they have a slam dunk or even a decent case to force OpenTTD to do anything. This is OpenTTD taking it up the rear for no real advantage other than some secret financial donations to their project.