"Total Annihilation" rights are being sold!!!

Come on Uber.. you know you want it!!

http://tweakers.net/nieuws/89246/atari- ... ation.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 30972.html

edit: 250k dollar for the Total Annihilation rights..

They only got $900k from the kickstarter not sure how much the pre orders have netted them but still. They will nay be splashing out on this not that they would even need to.

If I am remembering right they had $10 mill to make SupCom 1...

I honestly have no idea how these guys are going to come close to SupCom in half the time and for considerably less cash. I am thinking a lot of people are going to be expecting this game to blow SupCom out of the water which where FAF has taken it now it's no small feat.

250k$?
waste of money imho

PA is a more fitting name anyway.

Why bother? everyone who cares already knows that most of the guys behind PA where responsible for TA. And that PA is a spiritual successor. So what would be the point of having the rights? Plus 250K is quite a chunk of change, I'd rather Uber not waste that money, which would be better spent on getting PA finished off.

Would be a waist of time tbh. Everyone knows the new TA is PA

Not like they would rename it TA2

I guess you haven't been watching the live streams then, its already looking better than supcom, and the alpha's not even out yet.

I don't think Uber really need them, Chris Taylor or the Total Annihilation/Spring community could be a better buyer.

While we, the people who have backed PA, know what the true successor is of TA. Question is, does the rest of the world know this? Total Annihilation is a strong brand which should not be taken lightly if another company gets a hold off and create the "true successor", TA 3.

There is one hypothetical concern. What if some company bought up the rights to TA, and decided that PA was so close to TA that it constituted a breach of intellectual property rights? There are, arguably, some similarities in terms of economy, blocky robot design, some play-style features and title. PA even bills itself as a spiritual successor to TA in many ways.

I'm doubtful such an event would ever occur, but given the overly litigious state of a lot of games and technology companies at the moment, I would not be too surprised. Even though such a case would have little merit (at least to my untrained eyes), having to deal with a court case during development would be a royal pain in the arse.

Nah, not possible. While copyright and patent law is a mess in the US, its not that bad that its possible to sue over game idea and designs yet.


As for the topic, waste of money. PA is the new TA. Its close enough in name and abbreviation to even reach those who haven't heard much about PA yet but who've heard about TA. And still not close enough to be sueable. :mrgreen:

Legal actions shouldn't be an issue.

A possible TA3 however could be a bad thing, even if it had a completely different gameplay.

Well what I could see happening is that Wargaming buy the rights for GPG and get them to make a MMO RTS F2P version (Apparently they are already working on one right now), which considering Wargaming's attitude towards their community could be a bad thing.

However that is just speculation on my part, and it remains to be seen what GPG are actually working on for WG

And yet, we live in a world where Bethesda tried to sue Mojang because they dared to make a game that had the word "Scrolls" in the title.

Consider the following hypothetical scenario. EA bys the rights as part of an bulk IP portfolio sale at auction. They have a RTS game in the works by one of their studios, that they have yet to release details on. They decide that a simple way to boost sales would be to slap a TA label on it, and leave the incongruities with earlier games for marketing to sort out. On top of this, they send a cease and desist order to Uberent in order to sabotage potential competition, as a calculated risk. If Uber ceases, they have knocked out a game that could potentially eat into their sales. If Uber takes them to court and looses, then they can finish off a relatively small and talented company with exorbitant legal fees. If Uber takes them to court and wins, they have disrupted Uber's development schedule, delayed release, and placed a financial burden on their rival while they fight off the case, all for an amount of money for which EA, as a much larger company, can afford to loose.

Tell me that if you read about this story on a gaming-news website, you would say it was clearly fake, and that such ludicrousness could never happen. Tell me that this scenario is entirely implausible, and that a company like EA would never be so callous. Tell me that you have never seen some of the larger game companies do something so stupidly, cartoonishly, moustache-twirlingly, tying-a-damsel-in-destress-to-the-traintracks-and-laughing-manically evil, to a medium that we all enjoy.

I think not.

Just to be clear, I think that this chain of events is unlikely. But unlikely does not mean impossible or implausible. I don't think that this will happen, but I can certainly imagine a larger company doing this kind of thing, and it wouldn't be the first time. If TA IP rights end up in the hands of a games company with the financial clout and temperament to do something like this, it may be worth spending a small amount of time thinking about a contingency plan.

If it really came down to it then you could just change the name.

What I find funny is that the TA screen shot on tweakers.net is showing modded TA. There are at least 3 units in that shot that I recognize as not being made by Cavedog. Makes me wonder where they swiped the image from.

As for the TA rights, who cares. That ship sailed the day the PA kick starter ended and the TA community got behind PA. Sure someone could buy the rights and make a TA2 but its too late to stop PA from capturing a sizable chunk of the fan base.

you assume too much jedi

It would be a great sale boost if Uber would buy the rights. Maybe even to a point to rename PA to TA2 (yes, lets forget the other TA2 with those damn creatures.. still wonder whos idea it was to replace robots and explosions with creatures!).

I'm not saying that a TA2 wouldn't or couldn't be successful. I'm saying that since PA got the publicity first and will almost certainly be released first (roughly in December) that a TA2 would have a bit of an uphill battle to fight in the market. Missing a holiday season release is a big deal if your chief competitor didn't miss it.

And unless you stick Chris Taylor behind it a TA2 isn't going to have the street cred that PA has due to the people who are working on it.

Sure it look pretty but that's pretty much all you can gleen from watching small clips of someone else play it. Also atm it's fairly basic and limited to one planet.

Would be nice if they just show 2 people going at it and just did a cast of a game, show off some of that chrono cam goodness.

I would love to have the code released with an open source license. I would certainly give some money to that end.
In my opinion Planetary annihilation just sound right as a TA successor. No need to put the same name.