[Pujol]

Here is another idea. Develop a community care company like Themis for ND to work with. I think the community does have the talents and drive to do the hard work. I would be willing to through in with this in some form or other.

ok, ready for darts to start being flung.

[xerout]

I think it was EnB where a group of players tried to buy the game (it may have been another one though). The company that owned the game seriously considered selling it and gave them a price.....it was several dozen orders of magnitude more expensive than anyone ever dreamed. I bet you'd be surprised at how expensive it would be to buy Jumpgate if ND even agreed to sell it. I speculate that the physics engine alone could be sold by itself for some very decent money. I had also read a long time ago that there's still some weird connection to 3do or thier creditors regarding rights to the game but that could just be rumor.

Xer

[Sephiroth]

Well, they've said that they would never sell it, but I somehow doubt that for the right price they could resist selling it, especially considering that it probably makes them no money anyway (I mean, let's be serious, they have got to be losing money on it, I don't see the MG contract making up for what they are losing on the US server).

I would say that you should e-mail Scorch if you (or someone you know) is seriously interested in purchasing Jumpgate. Of course you'd have to be prepared to sink a lot of money into the game for it to have a chance of making you any money back. And yeah, you'd probably want Istvan as the Lead Programmer

[Bhurak]

I don't know. with the number of subscribers, and the bandwidth used, i imagine that it breaks even, if not makes a litle profit. Not enough to support the company, but a bit. Just a feeling i get. Companies don't usually suffer dead weight.


Bhurak

[Sephiroth]

There are maybe 500-600 subscribers now (okay, I can't say for certain but judging by 648 according to pilotstats.net which was last working in mid December and the current peak time online numbers and the most recent amount of cancelled accounts, I'd say it's a pretty safe estimate). So that's what... 5000-6000 per month? I just don't see that as being enough money to support an MMOG. I suppose with the MG contract they might not be doing too bad with Jumpgate, but I just find it hard to believe that they aren't losing money.

[Bhurak]

Well think about the minimal bandwidth they are using with the low numbers online. Plus with lower playerbase, i can only assume they can pare down the server hardware. They are at least breaking even. Otherwise they would ditch it, Josh's baby or no. Netdevil isn't sony, and can't throw money at dying games.

Bhurak

[Sephiroth]

Actually ND has said that they wouldn't shut Jumpgate down as long as one person was playing. The only reason they are still around is because of AA (Istvan has stated this).

Bandwidth and Istvan aren't the only costs ND has.

[Bhurak]

no, i imagine themis is also a bit of an expense.

I'm not saying those are the only expenses, but I believe that it turns a bit of profit.

Bhurak

[WileE]

An interesting idea Pujol. As I am an eternal grunt, I have no idea what is required to pitch an idea such as this.

Alternatively, I wonder how much the license rights would be to the DANCER engine...and how hard it is to code a game.

[KiaDevil]

I've considered purchasing Jumpgate if i were to win the lottery or something. but it would go to making me a return cause i'd hire former Jumpgate players to handle the community dirt cheap. minimum wage just to have the GM_ tag on your name. also hire istvan, and some help for the poor guy. if i could get 2 istvan's instead of 1, imagine where the game would be in 6 months

[Powo]

How about...

Making your own space game that has the same gameplay aspects like jumpgate?

Though I was going to recommend FreeBasic(It's a free, real and easier programming language) to get the Job done faster but I think I'm just the only person who is native to the BASIC language more than C++.

With my experience with C++, it would take years for a single person to get the project done but thats the way the majority of the game programmers wants it to be programmed in.

But anyways, I do sometimes make and texture ship.

[ELPIRATA]

www.parsec.org

I dont like much the idea of leaving ND... but the day I applied for beta (1 or 2 years before being accepted) I was checking also Parsec. The huge difference with Parsec (which is not a finished game) is this more of a quake in space thing, no economy and no stations (that i know), and the wormholes takes you to different sectors that if I remember right... can be handled by different servers (not sure).

Parsec now is a Open source thing, and can be run in Windows, Linux and Mac. I have the LAN test, but the joystick support was never finished, so it was keyboard only. Still... it looks pretty nice.

ELP

[Powo]

I've been to that site before.

However, the game and community looks virtually dead.

No one is actually working on it.