I'm surprised at this move. Bill Gates' father (a lawyer and the reason why Bill was able to retain owership of DOS from IBM) has tought his son to be very controlling of all his posessions and rights to them. I am quite, quite surprised that they would give up some of that control willingly. I am not familiar with the game. How old is the title?


Sir Spectre



Edited by - Sir Spectre on 2/13/2004 10:27:29 PM

IIRC, Allegience was from 2000 - think Battlezone in Space. It was actually quite a good game from what I've heard, but it suffered from poor timing - the game was released during the height of the "space sims suck" movement, and suffered from poor sales.

IIRC, Microsoft eventually discontinued its Gaming Zone servers, but private ones continued to run the game and distribute it in hopes of finding new fans - I've had the situation described to me by a longtime fan as "free warez", and similar to distribution of FreeSpace 2 on "abandonwarez" sites before Interplay pulled the plug on that by rereleasing the game. In fact, a lot of the things sound suspiciously like FS2 - a premiere space combat game released by a leading publisher, poor sales that eventually led to its demise, a small but devoted fan base that kept the game alive, and the release of the source code in hopes of facillitating future development.

This is a promising trend for Microsoft - if it succeeds in establishing Allegience, it could result in a similar sourcecode release of Freelancer once FL2 is released (whenever that'll be). My gut feeling on the subject, though, is that Allegience was simply one of those franchises with no real future (the aforementioned limited release of FS2, for instance, has absolutely no chance of turning any sort of meaningful profit), and Microsoft released it to gain goodwill among the community.

To add to that, some thoughts I wrote on the FreeSpace 2 re-release and what it might signal for the gaming industry:

As you might know, plans for a re-release of Freespace 2 were recently announced by Interplay, but the rather exorbiant $50 asking price has left some people suspicious. I don't think this is some sort of EVIL PLOT by Interplay to screw over fans, though - most of the existing FS fans already know about the Source Code Project (a project to "modernize" the FS2 engine, as it were, and a successful one at that) and are unlikely to shell out fifty quid for the re-release. And anyway, $100,000 is less than chump change for a MegaCorp like Interplay - there's absolutely no chance of turning a meaningful profit from this (in fact, it's more likely to generate a loss, which is pretty impressive to consider considering Interplay's financial state).

No, it's more likely an attempt to win over new fans (as a promotion for a future Freespace 3? we'll see) who don't know you can buy 20 copies of FS2 for 20 dollars on eBay. The ones who've never played a computer game before (and yes, there are still those) or aren't familiar with PC gaming, and might be tempted to pick it up. Unless FS2 can't compete with modern space sims :p (which is itself an oxymoron - there have been three space sims in the past three years, not counting Freelancer).

Coupled with X-2: The Threat, the release of the Allegience source code, rumors of a new Wing Commander game and even Derek Smart's Universal Super Desktop Commander 3000 Millenium Edition, it's a good time to be a space sim fan - I can't think of there being this many options since 1999. Hopefully the space sim slump is nearly finished - we're almost past the age of MMORPGs, and the only ones that'll matter are continuations of existing franchises (Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Everquest II, Ultima Online and Middle Earth Online). This could mark a resurgence of space sims similar to the RPG resurgence in the early '90s spawned by games like Diablo (and how many times has Freelancer, for instance, been compared with Diablo? :p). Things are most definetly looking up.

Careful with this topic.

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Further more any postings who are "bashing" in nature, might it be "I hate Microsoft", "I hate (some country here)" and the like will be instantly deleted. Also postings wich in nature are against the topic of this site, eg. Freelancer or Starlancer, run the potential risk of getting deleted unless they are not "bashing" in nature and well argumented. If you feel you where unrightfull censored, mail Bargib, and he might look into it!

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Moving to off-topic to be fair to other topics moved for the same reason.

Edited by - Stinger on 2/14/2004 3:29:00 AM

I think making it open source serves two purposes. The first is as BMcB, a good will gesture, the second is to test the water and see what develops.

At this point, being the only 600 pound gorilla can get lonely and you can get tired of being the poster boy for bad business behavior. Also, there is no real proof that going open source necessarily means you must lose money but it is untested waters for the likes of MS.