Free Allegiance Forums

How easy is it to get something on Steam, especially a totally free game with no profit-making elements at all and no backing from a game company? I don't want to rain on the parade, but a bit of poking around suggests that the only way to get a game on Steam without having the right game industry connections is by going through the Steam Greenlight program. And the main factor in whether Steam picks a Greenlight game off the list to go into the actual Steam catalog is how popular that game is among Steam users. In other words, we can't rely on Steam giving the game enough visibility to increase its popularity, since Steam won't pick up a game or potential game unless it's already popular enough to get a lot of votes from Steam users.

If I had to suggest a course of action, I would say start a project to port the game mechanics to a hip language like Rust, so random devs jump in out of interest or CV or internet points.

Yes. The Ideal situation is where we have full control of the game in a new engine.

If we cannot get enough dev's to make this realistic we might do some advertising on twitch to try and get player count up, get a little buzz on in the gamer community. And hopefully attract devs just out of pure interest on the project.

The only thing is, what if we do all this work, gather all these dragon balls, and then microsoft is like, hey look at that we could make some money from this game that we abandoned years ago. Like some kind of crazy dead-beat dad discovering their child is Justin Beiber.

I'm not good with metaphors.

The point is we don't want to do all this work only to have it swooped from us. So the main focus IMO is to secure rights (or just make our own game) so we can go balls-to-the-walls with advertising, money making, bitches having. Etc.

I have attempted to get somewhere with this and so far I have an e-mail address that I'm going to try to get through to MS about this.

My original PM:
(Edit: I've posted numerous links in this PM, ignore some of the things that sound stupid)
QUOTE Hi. I saw your post here
I'm a part of a community-run game called Allegiance and was looking to see if you could offer any advice. or possibly point us in the right direction.
Currently the community is in plans on taking action in trying to get more attention to the game by either promoting or by having Microsoft, who developed the game, fully release the rights to it so that we are able to take further better action in keeping the game alive by releasing the game on steam, etc. Thread is here if it interests you.
The community has kept this game going without any support and with limited funds since 2004. Right now the community is nearing an all-time low, only surpassing the days in which we had no public servers to group games together. Promoting games without funding isn't as easy as it was 6-7 years ago where Steam and Origin were small and unheard of, and people would look on numerous websites for new free games to play. I was wondering if you could offer any advice, or perhaps if you have a trusted law firm you could refer us to with opening a case to have Microsoft release the copyright to the game? I'm sure the community leaders and our devs have their own ideas, but if they do, the rest of us are in the dark. I just wanted to do my part and reach out to you and see if you could offer any help.
Thanks in advance.[/quote]


Response from the guy I've been PMing:

QUOTE This is difficult. Having a lawyer write the first email is probably not the best step, because MSFT's response will be to hand it to their legal team, which will have no obvious course of action (they're used to dealing with PROBLEMS, and there's no problem here for them, just a request).
The more efficient approach may to find someone sympathetic within MSFT who can try to find the stakeholder internally who has the right to ask legal to release the title.
It looks like it's actually in MSFT's shared source program. I'm going to have our lawyer review that license and tell me what exactly that license allows.
We'd love to help publish the title on Desura, but we'd definitely need someone who had the legal rights to the title for us to do that.[/quote]



If anyone would like to step in on this discussion, feel free. I'm not the best person in the world to be discussing this.

This is Desura

It's just like Steam, only more aimed towards Indie devs.

I wonder if Unity 5 would work. Unity is very easy to work with, and Allegiance isn't heavy by today's standards. Not even if it's made quite pretty.

Unity would definitively be a good candidate. Easy and powerful.
But still, re-develop a new Allegiance from scratch, including making better 3D models for ships and stations would take ages without a competent and numerous dev team.

Sigh we are already losing focus.
PORTING ALLEGIANCE TO WHATSOVER GAME ENGINE IS NOT, AND SHOULD NOT BE OUR MAIN GOAL!
Before we can do any of that, we need legal rights to the Allegiance franchise.
While we assemble a kickstarter fund for a lawyer, who can state our case to MSR, our MAIN GOALS should be:
1) New player retention.
2) promotion. (Keep up the good work DR).

I would appreciate thoughts and feedback on that PM so I can have more input on where to take it from here.

Well Although I am not American, I´ve taken a few steps (since I am lawyer) and contacted a few friends who are more used with the american law (specially owning legal rights).

What the guy said to you in his pm, was the best course of action my friends pointed me toward too.

Getting someone inside Microsoft who can contact their Department regarding releasing Allegiance. Getting any legal action trying to force MS to release the game would end in a very long and stress-tireing fight, wich would probably end with us losing, since they never trully released the rights.

They also advised me it would be smarter and probably easier if I tried to contact someone outside of the US because its usually easier to contact a director who are outside of the US, and they also can also get in touch about realeasing the project.