EA (Sold? Gave? Licensed?) Wing Commander to Piranha Games…And They Didn’t Use It
Our friends at the Wing Commander CIC reported yesterday about the announcement of Piranha Games’ Transverse, a multiplayer, online, space combat sim. The basic premise of the game is, I gather, thus:
Synthetic physical forms allow humans to pursue an existence in space and have opened the door to immortality.
This future is not without danger and the very substance of humanity will be tested in the distant regions of space known as the fringe. Out in the Fringe, factions of humanity race to explore space, claim resources, and create new technologies to tip the balance of power; with this race for new power, all of humanity is plagued by conflict with the remnants.
Out in the lawlessness of the Fringe humanity faces its greatest enemy: itself.
Human civilization’s journey into the fringes of space has only just begun. The Sol system has retreated into a closed society that does not tolerate disruptive influences. On the Fringe, players rule themselves, creating player run factions with their own laws and governance.
Players can choose to stay near the bounds of newly settled space, or take the risk to push into new space, and profit from undiscovered rewards and resources.
The game is being built with Unreal Engine 4, and the visuals are very…Star Citizen-esque, really. Even the ship designs that Piranha Games is selling as part of their effort to crowdfund Transverse bear striking similarities to the lineup of ships on offer for Star Citizen.
Now, as baffling as it is that a smaller, Vancouver-based developer whose main claim to fame seems to be MechWarrior Online (unless you count the console ports of Duke Nukem Forever, I suppose) is attempting to basically build I Can’t Believe It’s Not Star Citizen on a shoestring budget by means of a self-hosted crowdfunding campaign, here’s what I really don’t get: Piranha Games has the Wing Commander license, and chose not to use it:
We do indeed currently hold the license of Wing Commander. We first contacted EA about the WC brand in the spring of 2012, long before the initial announcement of products like Star Citizen. We approached EA because we had a deep love for the space combat genre and Wing Commander was right there alongside MechWarrior as our most beloved franchises we grew up with. In short at the time we thought we were going to be the ones taking that big initial risk to try and bring space shooters back.
Over the course of the next 18 months a significant amount changed – Star Citizen was announced, and by Late 2013 we found ourselves in possession of an exclusive license to Wing Commander and assembling a small team to craft a new experience. We spent six months developing, designing, and working on a marketing video with help from outsourcing partners. As we approached our reveal date, there was a moment of pause when we started to reflect on the brand, and design concepts. We reached a pivotal moment when some of our best design ideas were being pushed to the side as they just didn’t fit within the constraints of a WC game.
We looked carefully at what our WCO product was, looked at other competing products, and decided that we needed to move away from the Wing Commander universe. It was a tough choice, as we have a deep love and respect for the brand.
It became clear that our very best and original game idea was contained within all of the concepts that were pushed aside for our WC product. The concept for Transverse was born from a single thought, and inspired by all those unused ideas. In the end we realized we should be making our best idea and in doing so we found a corner of the spacesim genre that would make us stand out. In doing so we would also be providing Star Citizen with the respect it deserves and what it represents to their customers.
Let’s just be clear about that: Piranha Games took a long, hard look at the Wing Commander IP as the basis for a massive, player-driven space sim MMO, and decided that they had an even better idea.
The current crowdfunding total for Transverse, just for reference:
“Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.” It’s a quote that has been attributed to Samuel Johnson, and whether he actually is the originator of the criticism, its point would seem to apply here. Transhumanism can certainly be an interesting concept to mull over and explore, but there’s nothing particularly stand-outish about Piranha Games’ handling of the topic. The concept of player-driven universes is nothing particilarly special given EVE Online, and while the idea to have no NPCs in the game is a bit more novel…it almost seems like one of those things that works better as a thought experiment than as an actual game feature.
This comment on the Transverse forums basically says it all, I think:
So basically you are saying that you are responsible that Chris Roberts had to reinvent an entire universe because you were squatting the Wing Commander IP and you aren’t even using it.
I am literally lost for words. Probably a good thing.
Except he did eventually think of some words.
So basically… they are just sitting on it the Wing Commander IP and not doing anything with it ?
And EA prefered selling Wing Commander to THESE guys instead of Chris Roberts (I mean we KNOW there were talk between Roberts and EA about WC before Star Citizen was announced).
So yeah, don’t expect me to give you any cent guys. Your funding model is already terrible, but this just add insult to injury.
That would appear to be the thing that they are doing, yes.
This is why we can’t have nice things (like a decent Wing Commander game in the last 15 years)
Well we did get Freelancer, which is a better sequel to Privateer than Privateer 2 was by a long shot. But even that’s been over a decade now.
Meh, this has made me even more bitter and jaded. Squatting on the Wing Commander IP does nothing but make the world less awesome. Thanks a lot, Piranha Games. You guys lost the internet today.
did they just cut their funding in half ?
They did!
Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? I think so. I’ve had enough blue hair, and the name “Wing Commander” wasn’t even Roberts’ first choice when developing the first one. While the Kilrathi were certainly cool, the concept if viewed from a distance is actually pretty silly. Cat people? It’s as bad as some of the races from the Elder Scrolls.
It sounds like PB refrained from using the Wing Commander name because it would have been seen as an affront to the phenomenon that is Star Citizen. Now if Roberts asked PB if he could use the name and PB had the authority to sell/license it to him and PB said, “No,” then yeah, they’re assholes. If they didn’t have the ability to let Roberts use it, and Roberts and EA couldn’t work something out, then I don’t see PB as being at fault here other than for having the misfortune to decide to make a space sim at the same time as Roberts.
In the end it’ll come down to not so much who has the better concept, but who can better execute. Countless millions of dollars is no guarantee of a good game. For a project of the scope of both games you either need a lot of money or a lot of time. I’m just happy that we have at least four interesting-looking space sims in the works: Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous, No Man’s Sky, and now (possibly) Transverse.
I haven’t read the TFA regarding Transverse, but the idea of “synthetic physical forms” can be extremely interesting, and while extensively explored by films/series such as Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell and Star Trek, I haven’t seen too much of it in games. The idea that you can have backups of yourself, non-biological sensory input, memory syncs, divergent consciousnesses due to running yourself in two bodies simultaneously effectively creating two people, holographic projections of yourself over long distances (where’s my mobile emitter???)…it gets crazy fast.
I can’t be mad at Piranha Games MWO is just awesome though I wish they would give up the rights to WC and let Chris have it back. I am sure it wouldn’t be to hard to add in familiar names and Kilrathi to star citizen while keeping the new bad guys. But considering the last WC Privateer game wasn’t even set in the WC universe anyway would be nice to have a Wing Commander again.
The Wing Commander property belongs to Chris, even if he decides to let it rest in peace. He created almost everything in the Wing Commander universe and deserves to have the rights to it. Even though he did hurt the franchise considerably with a terrible, terrible movie that strayed way too far from the premise of the games, and he let his brother tarnish the wonderful Privateer franchise with the atrocity that was Privateer 2 (blegh!!). Still, it should have been sold to Chris long ago by EA for $1, with an apology letter for letting it stagnate for so long. But EA can suck a chode, they’ve yet again proven their incompetence by their handling of the WC franchise. As always, their short-sightedness has cost them millions, and they let the space combat simulation genre die. They could have partnered with Roberts again and Star Citizen would be WCOnline and they’d be raking in…what, $63 millions dollars as of right now? I’m not saying that would be better for fans. In fact, it would be MUCH worse to have those greedy morons associated with Star Citizen. But it would have guaranteed development of a much-needed game in this genre.
Regarding Pirahna Games, I want to like them. I’ve been playing Mechwarrior Online for a couple years, but these people drag their feet on everything, even to the point where people are leaving that game in droves because of persisting issues that were promised to be fixed over a year ago. I understand they’re a small team, but learn to prioritize. If you have numerous bugs that affect your player base, stop making new mechs and fix the issues first. Yeah, the game is fun….but with only 2 game modes to choose from, people are bored within months. They have added a couple maps, but there are still far too few of them. Considering the maps are not interactive at all, there’s really no excuse for there not being 30+ of them. Anyway, I haven’t touched in in half a year because there’s nothing new except new mechs. And I came back then after not playing it for about 5-7 months, so yeah. Boring and repetitive, but there is fun tactical combat that’s a slower pace than Hawken, etc. And that’s a good thing in my opinion!
When did EA give Wing Commander back to Chris for $1? That’s news to me.
I believe he said “it should have been sold…”, not that it had been.
Wing Commander lost me when I realized I was playing Night Trap with space ships in it. I keep hearing arguments about how it was good for the time, but I was there at the time and it was not good by any aesthetic measure.
Even so, the first two games were so unbelievably good that it really is a shame the IP is rotting. CR’s success does seem to show that EA has some trouble identifying underserved markets. What makes it confusing to me is just how big the Ultima and WC franchises were. That would be like Konami sitting on the Castlevania IP, or Nintendo shelving their Mario IP. To quote Tywin Lannister, “Madness and stupidity.”
You know, Erin Roberts was very much involved in the original Privateer too. 😛
And the Darkening was a good game – it just never should have been called Privateer 2 in the first place.
Ah, I got confused. The first sentence is that the property does belong to Chris and that must have messed up my comprehension and I was reading the rest of the post.