9 Aug
According to this post, there should be a statement issued by Perception & MGM in the next few days.
just got an e-mail back from perception, all they said was Perception and MGM will be clarifying the situation with a press release soon.
If there’s a joint statement coming from MGM and Perception, I think JoWood may regret pushing the issue like this
8 Aug
JoWooD regrets to be forced to cancel the development agreement with Perception, the Australian developer currently responsible for the Stargate-SG1: The AllianceTM license title. "The title in its current form, initially scheduled for an October 2005 release, does satisfy neither our quality requirements nor the fans expectations. We will not release anything that does not do justice to this well known license" says Albert Seidl, CEO JoWooD Productions Software AG. "In recent months we have invested a lot of time and resources in helping Perception finish the development, but we now simply have lost confidence in their ability to finish this project in time and sufficient quality."
This is terrible news! There’s no mention of this yet on the Perception hompage or the official game site, but according to a poster on the forums at Stargate Gaming a JoWood offical has said
I am the director of Brand management and just wanted to drop a few words before all hell breaks loose here tomorrow.
We are currently at a point where there will be potential legal issues that need to be clarified before we can say what happens to the project with any certainty. However we do fully intend to support it and hope to be able to finish the game in a timely fashion. However it may take some time before we have a clear view on things as there are differences of opinion regarding the legal situation between us and Perception. Unfortunately there is little concrete info we can give. We will maintain the forums and have no intention to close down the project as such. We will of course keep you posted on the devlopment.
As I understood it Perception had the rights to the voice actors, so I imagine that this will constitute a large part of the legal hassle.
This is such a pain, not just from a fans perspective, but also for Australian game development. This was going to probably be a fairly well-recieved game, and it will probably get picked up by an OS developer now (if ever).
Also on the official forums:
Here is what is going on in a nut Shell!
- Perception Holds the License to the Game and contracted JoWood Productions to Publish it.
- JoWood Invests 7.3 Million Euros and resources to the game.
- Supposedly JoWood has a demo of the game and they didn’t like what they seen and decided to kill the contract and now requesting all their money and now the Source Codes to the Game.
- Now is the legal part, JoWood vs Perception who has the rights to the said game and source codes.
That’s not an official statement though, so I just don’t know. It seems a wee bit odd that JoWood would wait until two months before release to do this if the quality was the real problem, surely this would have come up before they got far past the beta release. I mean the thing was shown at E3 and noone said anything. My cynical mind says that JoWood & Perception have had a falling out of some sort and JoWood are trying to pre-empt legal action by going on about quality problems. But then, I am cynical.
Post over at the Atomic forums says there’s rumours that Valve might be picking it up. Don’t you just love un-substantiated internet rumours?
5 Aug
I’ve changed the RSS/Atom feeds for this site into a FeedBurner Feed. I’ve done this for a number of reasons, but mostly it’s so that I don’t have to worry about providing multiple different types of feeds, as FeedBurner shows the feed in whatever format the user wants, RSS or Atom. It also syndicates my del.icio.us links automatically too.
Is anyone has any problems with the feed not working please let me know, I’ve redirected all the old feed URLs to http://feeds.feedburner.com/DevelopmentOnAShoestring, so it should be completely transparent.
4 Aug
Celebrating Thirty-One Years of Marriage: Ten Things I’ve Learned and a followup by David at Ridgecrest Blog. I designate both posts as required reading for anyone who has entered, or is considering entering, into marriage.
Best points:
Forgive! Eric Segal’s characters in Love Story liked to say, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” What a crock! The only human being who has no reason to say they’re sorry is dead.
…
Love and take responsibility for your kids, if you have children.
Some men and women view their children as unwanted impositions, which is a tragedy. If you’re not willing to take equal responsibility for the upbringing of your children, then don’t have them. But if you are willing, they will bless you and your marriage.And you’re not allowed to change your mind after your kids are born or adopted! They don’t go away; neither should your commitment.
10. The best gift a man can give his children – is to show them how much he loves their mother.
11. The second best gift he can give them – is his time.
Also highly recommended is Mark’s It’s Time to Dethrone Romance.