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Author Topic: Cost for Licensing Rights to the Engine  (Read 6365 times)

Abyssus Games

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Cost for Licensing Rights to the Engine
« on: August 11, 2012, 10:03:44 am »

Hey I was just wondering if you have any ideas on how you are going to do the licensing rights for Outerra? Is it going to be an annual set fee or is it going to be based on royalties. (Or Both)

I only ask because my studio is pulling funds together for the zombie survival game using the Outerra engine which is well on the way and we are trying to determine how much we are going to need to invest to cover the licensing and servers for the game.

Thanks

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ZeosPantera

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Re: Cost for Licensing Rights to the Engine
« Reply #1 on: August 11, 2012, 10:38:25 am »

Don't take anything I am about to say as fact or even close to a guess but since you posted this publicly I feel I can chime in on how I would like to see it work before you get an official response.

Outerra the world renderer and *game hosting platform should cost some money to all users that download it and want to expand its function past the DEMO like we have currently. The OT team sells them access to the engine as a blank world simulator, most likely with a recurring subscription to keep the Devs going ($10-15/year?)

Once a user has an account they have the ability to ADD-ON something like your zombie game for an additional amount of money directly to you (One time $20 fee).

With the OT Base on everyone's computer they can now ADD-ON any number of free and pay-for game mode add-ons to the world. (Flight simulators, Military Shooters, Baja Racers, Missile Command, Sandbox Builders) Expanding the user-base.

So everyone pays the OT team to keep development of the engine up to date. People who want to pay for your zombie overlay of the Outerra world can pay your company directly (or purchase through the OT base from something similar to the Steam Store). Also allowing all the people who buy OT for your Zombie game to load up any number of free and pay add-ons.

You bring customer subscriptions to OT for your game and they pay you directly for the mod. Everyone gets paid, everyone is happy.

*Essentially EVERYTHING for Outerra should be DLC.
« Last Edit: August 11, 2012, 10:52:00 am by ZeosPantera »
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cameni

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Re: Cost for Licensing Rights to the Engine
« Reply #2 on: August 11, 2012, 05:31:06 pm »

Well it's all rather early, saying that you are going to develop a game on OT requires that we survive the winter :)

Although it's not yet fully determined, Zeos is right here, describing a future game/sim platform that will hopefully grow out from the basis laid down by Anteworld. This platform is meant to be open to both freeware and commercial games/sims/addons, with some royalty percentage, and with a store so that people can get it from within OT directly. The platform client will take care of the distribution, updates and content delivery (but not realtime mp servers).

The model is meant to be indie-friendly, and unless you need some extensive/guaranteed support level or a custom world realm, there would be no extra dev payment. We would like to avoid a recurring player subscription, since the income we will need for continuing support and development should come from the games/sims running on the platform and from their royalties. However, since the freeware stuff pays zero royalties from zero sales, but it still consumes server resources, it may turn out not to be sustainable. But if any, it would be a low subscription, just to cover the expenses spent on the servers, and it won't apply to people who purchase other stuff.

However, keep in mind that it's all preliminary and everything can change, and it will take quite some time until we get there. But this is what we now plan and want to do.
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Abyssus Games

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Re: Cost for Licensing Rights to the Engine
« Reply #3 on: August 12, 2012, 06:04:37 am »

That should be fine, we just wanted a general idea of your plans in terms of licensing so we can incorperate it into our business model.

Would we be able to distribute the installation package for both our game and OT through our own servers as well as yours as this could increase you amount of people that know about our game and OT.

The only worry we have is with you having the base engine which is used across any DLC made for OT that is on the clients pc, would this not limit the modifications we can make to the engine to make it suitable for the game's needs?

We think that royalty is a good way to go even more so with you hosting content servers. As it stands at the moment we have £70,000 to invest into our MP servers (for the first year) but with the content servers that you will be hosting would each DLC get it's own server or would they be shared. If they are shared would there be a way of getting one (or more) servers that are dedicated just for our game say for an annual fee on top of the royalties?

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cameni

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Re: Cost for Licensing Rights to the Engine
« Reply #4 on: August 12, 2012, 09:30:23 am »

Redistribution - possible, but it will get synced to the current version anyway.

The only worry we have is with you having the base engine which is used across any DLC made for OT that is on the clients pc, would this not limit the modifications we can make to the engine to make it suitable for the game's needs?
It certainly will limit you to some extent. But the goal is to achieve good performance and especially smoothness, avoiding jerking and similar issues, and allowing coexistence of multiple addons. This mainly applies to the global world simulator, where you can have multiple addons from different manufacturers and it all must be functioning together. For that it's important for OT client to have the control of the game loop, insulating the modules from such basic chores in order to guarantee the system remains fluid. There's a lot of specialized functionality in OT that takes care of that - controlled asynchronous tasks for loading of data, that are executed in a way that would prevent congestion of resource access etc.

The APIs will allow you to write loadable modules that contain the game code, that get's regularly invoked (and measured to give you hints about erroneous conditions and delays). In that sense it's of course more constraining that your usual engines.

But also other things - lots of stuff is optimized and thus made fit to the scenario we are using. That means there's no arbitrary freedom in what lighting and shaders are used, for example. Simply, unlike most of engines, this one is specialized - it has to be, to achieve its goals.

Quote
... but with the content servers that you will be hosting would each DLC get it's own server or would they be shared. If they are shared would there be a way of getting one (or more) servers that are dedicated just for our game say for an annual fee on top of the royalties?

To explain - we are running the server on a cloud service, and its purpose (apart from account system management) will be also to manage the static content you create for the instance of your world. Say there's a prehistoric realm of Earth, and you base your world instance off of that. You would get an instance that is going to be managed by you, meaning that you can grant other users the privileges to design there (or to play or whatever roles there can be). As a group you would be creating your world, some importing models that would be registered on the server and made available to other members, some creating scripts or game modules that would get registered and distributed automatically in the same way. Suppose you have a tester somewhere far far away who would sit down behind the computer and log in, selecting a revision to test. Modules and stuff will get downloaded from our servers automatically, and he can go on. So far its all been handled by us, but if he needs to test multiplayer, that would be in your charge, but basically all the data that are not realtime MP stuff can (and should) go from us.

Obviously all that transfers cost something, so if it's excessive there would be some extra fee.
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Abyssus Games

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Re: Cost for Licensing Rights to the Engine
« Reply #5 on: August 12, 2012, 10:02:03 am »

Some constrictions on the alterations to the engine is not a problem as long as we can get to a stage where we are happy with the outcome of the game. The core engine wouldn't need to be modified at all, it was more about if any alterations were needed for the engine and our systems for the game would interact correctly. We should be to load the systems into modules without any trouble so hopefully we won't need to tamper with the engine at all.

With the cloud service hopefully everything will run smoothly we were just worried that as the OT community grows and the cloud service is getting more use it could slow down the speed at which game information can be downloaded to our clients especially at peak times. If you believe this will not be the case then thats fine with us.

In terms of the dynamic location of pick-up items and npcs throughout the world I would presume that would be handled by our MP servers rather than you cloud?
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cameni

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Re: Cost for Licensing Rights to the Engine
« Reply #6 on: August 12, 2012, 10:15:24 am »

Well, scalability is one of the main points of the cloud, that's also why it's been chosen.

Yes, dynamic stuff is on MP servers, mainly because the lag of the cloud service can be too high for the gameplay.

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Abyssus Games

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Re: Cost for Licensing Rights to the Engine
« Reply #7 on: August 12, 2012, 10:27:38 am »

All sounds good to me, looking forward to it.
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