On 2/21/2024 6:03 AM, kyonshi wrote:
On 2/20/2024 4:58 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
Okay, this one is actually both more and less exciting than it sounds.
* Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2645580/Free_Stars_The_UrQuan_Masters/
Less, because a) this isn't a special offer that you gotta
run to take advantage of, and b) because the game was free
before; it just had another name. Essentially, this is just
"Star Control 2" (remember that classic?) with a new title,
forced upon it due to various legal issues. Still, the game is
still well regarded (despite its age) and it being free is
just icing on the cake.
So, free game and Star Control is back; that's cool. Grab it today, or
tomorrow, or whenever. But grab it. It's an excellent DOS-era game
with some nice modern QOL flourishes, and it wants to be in your
library.
ok, here's some interesting stuff:
1. the Ur-Quan Masters (the game formerly known as Star Control II) has
been a freeware game for decades now, and from what I have seen is one
of those standard games downloads that have been ported to all kinds of different Linux distributions. I remember installing the package uqm on
at least 5 different machines. (It also is a rather small package
nowadays. The website for this game has been https://sc2.sourceforge.net/
2. this particular game seems to be exactly the same, but with a
different title. it seems the game is free mostly as advertisement for a sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters (that is Free Stars: Children of
Infinity). I do wonder how that works with all the copyrighted terms in
the game.
The original devs filed a DCMA against Stardock for it, Stardock sued
the original devs about it. It was settled. Basically each company got
to keep their fork and name and it can't be brought to suit again. From
the summary it seems a fairly amicable settlement. Here's a nice summary
if you want more details, which also has links to the full details.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/stardock-and-star-control-creators-settle-lawsuits-with-mead-and-honey/
UQM2 has been in production limbo as long as UQM has been around, so I
don't have much hope of seeing it come out before I or the devs die.
I enjoyed SC: Origins quite a bit, and feel it's a good addition to the franchise. Sadly it was a huge financial flop. $10m in dev costs,
marketing is unknown, but typically double that. All I can find is 50k
in the first week, and at $29 that's about $1.5m. I can find current
numbers, but the max estimate I've seen is 300k, but could be far less,
and sales would eat into the total, max would be about $9m. That still
didn't pay for dev costs even if very high estimate were true. So we
aren't likely to see anything else Star Control from Stardock.
--
-Justisaur
ø-ø
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