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Ubisoft to Publish Puzzle Pirates
Ubisoft announced this morning that they have come to an agreement with 3 Rings Design to publish Puzzle Pirates in retail stores. This exciting news couldn't come for a better game, winner of the IGF 2004 Technical Excellence and Audience Awards for Online games. From the Puzzle Pirates site: "Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is an online game in which you play a Pirate character in an ocean world. Hundreds of your fellow player Pirates swarm these Isles and Sea-lanes. For Pirates who love acronyms, Puzzle Pirates is an massively multi-player online roleplaying game, or mmoarrrrpg." Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is available for Demo on PC/Mac/Linux.
From the FAQ on the box release:
Cleaver wrote:
Your play experience will be unchanged save that you might see the odd person with something that you can't normally buy.
People have no obligation to buy the box over the download in order to play on the servers, but offline puzzling is an awfully handy idea IMHO.
-Liz
Not the way I see it.
I usually have one online game that I pay for at a time. The ~$15 I pay is by far cheaper than other types of entertainment.
Been to the movies lately? Played a round of golf? Bowling? A bar?
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
This is a great day for Three Rings; they have my hearty congratulations for surviving and then succeeding in the face of the withering trials of a small independent game developer.
Without a giant corporate bankroll and without any notice from the retail distribution "trust," they succeeded in launching really distinct and fun proprietary content, creating a thriving community, and finally just being so plain good that the majors were forced to notice.
I wish them all the success in the world, not only because they've clearly earned it, but because their story is a potential wind shift for smaller independent developers everywhere. Maybe the publishing system is finally seeing the costs of its hubris about budgets, "3dism," genre-lock and dealing with little guys, and realizing the value in doing smaller more unconventional deals.
There is an enormous untapped talent pool out there on the internet; Three Rings is one of many little guys who are doing great things way outside the norms of video game "Hollywood." Recognizing them, and fitting them into the distribution system in some meaningful way, would be a good thing for the industry, a great thing for gamers.
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I've been a player for a year and a half, and the community is actually the most diverse I've ever seen in an online game. Most of the players are between 15 and 35, but there are a fair number of families that play too-- kids as young as 6 years (with parental permission of course) and parents as old as 50.
Because the game is so socially focused, you find that the most socially and politically adept people become the Captains, Kings, and Governors of the game. It's not at all like a traditional MMORPG where your guildmaster is the guy who logs in the most often and has the items with the highest numbers. Teamwork and community are the foundation of the game, so it naturally attracts those people most interested in those things.