Please,Please,Please

I'd SO buy that.
And maybe even a new hidden character or 2.
Or a monthly downloadable map pack from PSN for ten bux a pop *COUGH* hint hint.

For Xbox 360 pls
Please Please Please

We can no longer publish the Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance games, so any collection of BGDA1 and BGDA2 would have to come from someone else.

pax,
-Chris

just wondereing...

if you can no longer produce the game, what would need to be done to produce the game or so that you could..?

It's all down to the license rights which a company called Atari currently owns if I recall correctly.

so to produce a third baldurs gate

you would need the license from ATARI anything else you would need??

Not Atari, I think it would be Wizards of the Coast since they own the ruleset used for the game or something like that. gamesas lost the license to Baldur's Gate in the 2003/2004 range and Atari picked it up from them by licensing it from the original owners (Wizards of the Coast). I think gamesas still owns the license/rights to Icewind Dale though.

Just in case there is any confusion, I don't work for either company, I'm just going through the steps any business would need to take if they wanted to work with a licensed property. Oh, and I'm not a lawyer either in case someone finds this looking for information on licensing.

im just intrested in gamesas and the game developing buisness and i enjoy baldur gate aswell
for example how would gamesas go about gettin the ruleset back would it simply be buying the license back off them..?

if they could accuire the license again they could possible produce the next game..?
i saw in a forum that gamesas sold the rights to the game to snowblind and they had a certain amount of time to make the game or the rights would revert back to atari..?

any help you can give would be great

No problem at all,

I think I goofed up somewhere, gamesas does not own the Baldur's Gate license and now apparently don't own the rights to publish Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 1 or 2 yet they have the rights to make 3?

http://kotaku.com/377733/gamesas-sequelizing-earthworm-jim-dark-alliance-descent-mdk

According to this interview which is pretty recent, Atari own the rights to Baldur's Gate

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/106/1066954p1.html

Publishers losing publishing rights after a license expires or is removed is nothing new in the industry, Midway's sports stuff is probably the most famous example. It would seem odd though if gamesas lost the rights to the first two DA games yet had the rights to make a third, maybe something has changed since 2008?

Another possibility is it could be like the Fallout franchise where gamesas has the rights to deal with the three Fallout games in their present form, if they wanted to bring it to different platforms it would be Bethesda's call.

Anyway to answer your original question once a developer has the rights to develop a title they can do so assuming it is within the rights of the contract. My understanding is you usually go to the license holder with a project in mind, a good portfolio, cash, etc before you can license anything out. License holders don't have to license their stuff out if they don't want to so there is no guarantee that you could get one.

Someone who has licensed out something usually can't sell the rights to it unless the contract says they can. It's very rare that someone would let you do this since most companies want control over their stuff to basically see who uses it and how.

The developers have mostly moved on, BioWare was bought by EA and Snowblind by Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment so get them to develop a sequel would be pretty hard, the Black Isle people moved on to Troika (which shutdown a few years ago) and Obsidian (which is still in business, most of the original staff are at this studio from what I'm hearing).

I don't know if it was over the rule set, I've never played Baldur's Gate so I can't comment much on what the game might have that Wizards of the Coast has claim over. I was more into gamesas for the Star Trek stuff, Fallout, Mig Alley, etc.

ok so basically gamesas has produced baldurs gate 1 and 2 but doesnt own the rights to do anything with it?
and now they want to produce a thrid but they havent got the money and atari own the licenses..?

sorry if i sound dumb just trying to wrap my head around it

They didn't produce them persay, they simply published them, some were developed by their internal studios though.

It's mostly speculation at this point, gamesas is tight lipped about a lot of stuff at this point so we basically need to play the waiting game. To some capacity Atari does own the license yes, in some cases multiple companies can own the rights to a license at once.

We own the Dark Alliance name. We can make further Dark Alliance games. We cannot make additional Baldur's Gate games, nor can we republish the old BG games.

pax,
-Chris

Ah, so a Dark Alliance 3 could not have the Baldur's Gate name in front of it then? At the same time you wouldn't be able to do anything with the first two titles since they have the Baldur's Gate name in front of them?

Couldn't the current holder of the BA license make their own BA DA 3 if that was the case? How would characters and such work?

Something like that, yes. I'm not sure how the characters would be handled... I'm not familiar with the contracts nor am I a lawyer nor do I play on TV. (I have played a lawyer in a Traveller RPG, but that probably doesn't count.)

pax,
_Chris

I've become what I tried to avoid!

Thanks for the input though, it's probably to early to talk about that stuff anyway, I'm sure all will become clear with time.