buying the rights to MCO

[hemibros]

i've recently been in contact with EA asking about buying the rights and source code for MCO. I think they are willing to sell it at a reasonable price under few conditions.
i think you can buy the rights to mco for $10,000 USD waiting for ea to reply they are also going to send me a list of conditions.

Might be able to get enough donations to buy the rights and use the MCO engine for MWO.. i would be willing to pitch in $2,000 and have partial rights to the name.

ill post more information if interested.

[Grbgemen]

good luck. when EA shut MCO down, one of the dev's tried to buy the rights for a lot more money than that.

i believe the dev was Yikes. he wrote an article about it but i can not find the website.

edit: the original pagae is no longer up. but using one of those old web page archives, i found it. the page might load slow.

http://web.archive.org/web/20041118210940/http://www.geocities.com/driveryikes/MCO_Sale.html

[KEN]

That's quite the price drop if your information is correct. Looks like three zeros are missing from what they wanted back in 2003. Best of luck to you.

[hemibros]

That's quite the price drop if your information is correct. Looks like three zeros are missing from what they wanted back in 2003. Best of luck to you.

yes i've been talking back and forth about a month with them(finally getting somewhere) they mentioned 10k under many conditions.. now this is also under condition that you can't re-sell or charge people for services.. ill keep ya posted

also in consideration was 6 years ago and still fairly popular.. i do remember Yikes trying to buy the rights and i ran into a forum where they where selling it last year for $30,000 to different value game company's, but never sold.(weather thats true or not)

anyways in the first steps here had to make alot of calls hard getting them to talk to me they said there going to send me a email of some terms and condition and all the fees evolved.

[roadweasel]

I moved this thread to gaming chat since it's not really OT in MWO general chat. It would be awesome to be able to buy MCO and I'll be interested to see what the bottom line is!

[Sub]

In the spirit of cutting the crap - Say you actually buy the source code off EA, then what?

Will you keep the security encryption or remove it from the game and then recode the server/client? Would you know how to write a patch that would reroute everything to your own servers? Do you actually have a licensed version of Oracle 7 with the proper updates or are you skilled enough to transfer the tables to modern SQL servers? Do you know how to set up the dev environment needed to recode the game to look for SQL server responses? Are you aware that it takes 4 such servers to run a single instance of MCO? Do you have the hardware and bandwidth available for that?

If you're looking to drop that much cash and talk anyone else into helping out, you'll need believable responses to these questions.

Though EA has never been known to sell their intellectual properties, i won't say it isn't possible - especially in this economy. But for rights to the game and the numerous licenses required to legally run it (think names like Ford and Chevy, among many others), i'd be surprised if anyone but a serious company with a lot of money and a major business plan could make it possible.

[baddog_1_2k]

Sub makes some good points EA has the rights to use chevy ford dodge ect.... Now being they made the game I don't know if you would need those rights or not but I would certainly look into that..would love to play again if it did work out. good luck 4 sure

[Wraith]

In the spirit of cutting the crap - Say you actually buy the source code off EA, then what?

Will you keep the security encryption or remove it from the game and then recode the server/client? Would you know how to write a patch that would reroute everything to your own servers? Do you actually have a licensed version of Oracle 7 with the proper updates or are you skilled enough to transfer the tables to modern SQL servers? Do you know how to set up the dev environment needed to recode the game to look for SQL server responses? Are you aware that it takes 4 such servers to run a single instance of MCO? Do you have the hardware and bandwidth available for that?

If you're looking to drop that much cash and talk anyone else into helping out, you'll need believable responses to these questions.

Though EA has never been known to sell their intellectual properties, i won't say it isn't possible - especially in this economy. But for rights to the game and the numerous licenses required to legally run it (think names like Ford and Chevy, among many others), i'd be surprised if anyone but a serious company with a lot of money and a major business plan could make it possible.

This is precisely why I see no reason to pursue this. I think MWO will be a better game overall, and I wouldn't want the pursuit of this to put any delay in its release.

[KEN]

Sub your post just made me realize how much I appreciate RakNet & mySQL and how great it is working with MWO and our asset server.

[Sub]

Had they used anything other than an ancient version of Oracle, we might have seen a pirate server pop up by now. But between that and the security encryption, even EA would have a pretty tough time figuring out how to build a server at this point. I mean, if they had a team of brilliant coders with a knowledge of such things and all the needed resources available, they could probably do it, but it's one tall order.

Since you can't even get Oracle 7 from anywhere at this point, a certain amount of transferring tables to either a newer version of Oracle or to SQL would have to go on. A pretty heavy patch for the original game would then also need to be made to get it to communicate with the new servers properly. It just seems like a technological nightmare that not just anyone would want to wander in to.

[Kevman]

Hence the reason, no one has purchased it for $10,000..

[DevilMan]

yeah, 10 grand would just be the tip of the iceburg it would take to get it all back up and going again.

[Budweiser442]

I am Hoping that MWO will fill the void that MCO left

[421HO]

I have news for you, if you are pursuing this venture I would forget the ancient game code and go after the licenses. The parts and the cars is where the money is at. I am sure one of the stipulations they will make if you were to buy the code is that you could not use the names to the cars, parts, and tracks. 100% positive on that one, also you will not get the licenses for 10K either.