Slashdot Mirror
RTS Halo Mod Stopped by Microsoft
Headcase88 writes "Microsoft has officially asked the creators of Halogen to stop development at once. Halogen was an RTS mod being developed by Halo fans for the past three years. From the website: ' I was going to write a big sappy letter here, but what's the point. So..that's it then, I guess. The forums, site, and Moddb profile will all be shut down within the week. I can't say it hasn't been fun. It's a shame it has to end like this, but I suppose that's how it goes. Thanks, guys, for all the time you've spent supporting us. It's been a pleasure. We hate this as much as you do.' "
Too bad Valve didn't do this with Counter Strike, if they did maybe they would still be in business now...
Three years and MS never said anything. Makes me wonder if Bungie has a Halo universe based RTS in the works post Halo 3.
I'm confused...is this a C&C mod taking place in the Halo universe? Yeah, I guess I can't blame MS for shutting them down. But what's stopping them from removing Halo references, changing the graphics/story a bit and reopening?
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
The forums, site, and Moddb profile will all be shut down within the week.
If only I knew this before they closed it all down (I wish that said by the end of the week!), is someone going to host this on a torrent site somewhere? Thanks.
This reminds me of when EA put a stop to Peroxide's Ultima I remake. Peroxide never intended to make any money off of their work, and I doubt these guys did either... Yet these companies squash the project. If I were in their positions, I would be flattered that people enjoyed their product so much they decided to make a tribute to it.
The forums, site, and Moddb profile will all be shut down within the week.
Faster than that, if you make the main page.
Why invest three years in a mod when you know the environment is hostile?
Isn't modding a game simply legal? While selling it without permission would be iffy at best, making a mod should not be. Distributing it can be tricky, if you need to distribute copyrighted files along with your modded files.
Maybe get some legal advice? Stopping development on a pet project just 'cause someone says you can't do it seems overkill.
Halo was originally going to be an RTS, back when its working title was Armor, I think. Then it became a third person shooter, then MS bought Bungie and fucked everything up.
Let Microsoft know we're here! Drop them a line and protest it. Think it through, add all arguments against closing it down, order them and send them through. If you're short on time, at least send a mail saying you disagree. It takes 20 seconds and may help, you never know. Microsoft has billions, more products and lawyers than the Senate, a five foot effigy of Kaiser Sosa and some far too intelligent buggers running sales, but we are the Slashdot Effect.
- Jynx
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
The mod community has aware of the risks of this type of mod since the infamous 'Foxing' of the Aliens vs. Predator mod in 94. If you use someones elses IP and they get wind of it, you have a 90% chance of getting shut down. Best case scenario, you get to finish the product but they own it/have massive say in what happens.
To be fair, these mods do undercut the future marketability of franchise products. Lets say they did pull off an extremely popular, successful Halo RTS game - now Bungie just has more competition. Going the other route, if make a notorious bomb of a mod, Halo could end up with a black mark in the RTS arena.
The ironic thing is, chances are decent that the people who actually work on the game day to day probably don't care, as devs aren't typically focused on the long term/5-10 year value of the IP.
This shows Microsoft is not a game company, and is not to be taken seriously for gaming.
Smarter companies like Bethesda do the exact opposite: they release the tools they used to make the game themselves, and support and advertise modding. As a consequence, they get free workforce to improve and advertise the game they are making money with - for little cost. In the last game, they didn't even have to optimize meshes or document the construction set; modders are doing the job for them.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Seriously. Go install Freenet and Frost. Give it an hour to get up and running within the network. Create a Frost board, announce it, and coordinate further development pseudonymously.
Hey... what's that Jake?
These guys are making an RTS Halo Mod, sir.
Gosh... isn't that..?
Yes sir, it's what we call 'a good idea'.
Jake, call the lawyers. This must be stopped at all costs.
They're already on their way, sir.
When creating a project based on someone else's IP, particularly using actual art of that IP, it's best to get an agreement from the copyright owner. I think that Roosterteeth, the creators of "Red vs Blue", reached an agreement with MS that allowed them to make their videos (which utilized art taken right out of Halo itself). These "Halogen" guys (this is the first I'd heard of them) should've done the same.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I haven't heard a single complaint from Microsoft about Red vs Blue, and that was arguably a commercial venture for at least awhile. In fact, Bungie included features in Halo 2 specifically to help RVB -- the ability to lower your weapon, for one.
Ok, fine, it wasn't a game, it's a TV series, but isn't that reasonable competition for, say, the Halo movie?
Not to mention that this actually hurts MS more than it helps them, though it probably won't have much of an effect.
Can anyone give me a moral and/or legal downside to leaving the mod team alone? Or maybe signing some rights over to them, if you need to make it legal?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Thank God this hasn't happened to the myriad Star Wars/Star Trek fan films.
Bothers you, heh, how droll. Microsoft created and owns the Halo universe. It doesn't bother you that the creators of Halogen used Microsoft's copyrighted content in their own game for their own personal benefit? But it bothers you that Microsoft is not ok with this? Your point of view bothers me.
If the shoe were on the other foot you'd be screaming bloody hell. If those guys created Halo and Microsoft based their FPS off that RTS then you and everyone in the world would be up in arms. But because they are making some crappy RTS that would have sucked, that is to say if it were ever to see the light of day, then it's ok because nobody is going to play it.
What if it didn't suck. What if it were the best game ever created? Everyone would run out and buy C&C Generals to play the mod and that company would make a ton of money, but Microsoft wouldn't make a dime. As a matter of fact, Microsoft would be at a huge disatvantage should they decide to make an RTS out of Halo.
This is so clear cut Microsoft is right and Halogen is wrong that it isn't even funny. Truth is, if it were any other company than MS then nobody would have ever said anything at all.
Microsoft made a mistake... we had a glimpse of their so nice behavior despite all their efforts to hide what they do in the shadows...
I don't know anything about Halogen, but there is another fan-coded RTS/FPS called Tremulous. It's pretty fun, and very well balanced. It's based on the GPL Quake 3 code. Nobody is going to be sending a cease-and-desist letter any time soon... or ever.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
..since it seems lots of people are missing this: This is a mod of C&C, NOT Halo. It's a conversion to make the units in C&C be Halo units (and more). Basically they're taking Bungie's IP and putting into EA's game, NOT converting the existing Halo engine into an RTS.
While I would love to see this completed and play it, I can see where MS is coming from. Their IP is selling EA games. This is no different than when Blizzard shut down the WC3 Total Conversion (a Starcraft mod that was making it into Warcraft) at least with that one the IP all belongs to the same company.
I've always hated people that make a "MOD" for a game but act like they are creating some entirely new top secret game.
"HALOGEN BETA POLICY: READ!
Halogen beta policy is that WE ask you to beta test, not the other way around. There will be no public beta. Asking for a beta will NOT change our minds. The mod will be released only when it is finished."
What the hell? They're just making a mod. Not only are they just making a mod, but they are just making a mod using someone else's ideas. What do they have that is so sooper sekret? Are they worried someone is going to try to rip off their incredibly original idea of ripping off a very successful game in mod form?
What possible benefit is there to make a mod and advertise it and get people interested in it, but not let anyone play it? Oh, oh, oh! I know, pick me! Pick me! Because they want to feel powerful. They want people to feed their ego. They don't mod because they enjoy the creative process, they mod because they want a bunch of people to give them M2SBR.
If they ever would have released it, I'm sure there would have been plenty of bold statements like ALL CONTENT WAS CREATED BY SOENSO DUMFRUK. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO RE-USE OR MODIFY ANY CONTENT WITHOUT WRITTEN CONSENT. WE MADE THIS MOD AND YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO EVEN TALK ABOUT IT WIHTOUT US GIVING YOU PERMISSION.
It's a shame they didn't get shutdown for being self-absorbed ego junkies instead of for being ripoff artists without an original thought to share between them.
Pretty simple. MS is making their own Halo RTS. MS owns the copyrights to the characters and used that to leverage the shutdown. They shutdown this particular mod because it is close to their product, and with the same chars, it would be competition.
This is just Microsoft being arrogant about the fact that a small, "unprofessional" team of people can create something that millions of people want and they, with all their billions and teams of "professionals" can't. They're too busy making a PC Halo 2 that nobody can play because nobody's buying Vista. I say they reprogram the whole thing on a Quake 3 engine or something, minus any actual mention of the word Halo of course.
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
"What amazed me most about it was the way he said "I wouldn't expect you guys to finance the publishing", like he thought he would be doing us a favour."
You'll notice that a lot of the slashdot comments have the above either explicit as a motive, or implicit. "Hey! We're doing you a favour. You should let us do whatever we want. (never mind in this case they were doing C&C a favour, not MS/bungie)". You'll see the same attitude in the copyright stories that get posted here.
Maybe a more informative story would be, "why is there such a disconnect between the public and artists*?"
*Especially artists that pursue making money from their endevours.
FMF will be like Fallout 2.
http://www.fanmadefallout.com/
If they are shut down now after all their hard work I'll seriously hate the legal holders of "Fallout".
Anyways, like someone said, what's to stop these C&C Halo guys to change the graphics etc so it doesn't take place in the Halo universe, and then continue working?
Someone interested in this mod should ask the site owner about this, maybe he just didn't think about it?
/ MackanZoor
Pardon my ignorance, but what is an RTS mod?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I assume a Halo RTS would be exactly like the original C&C, but then people who had never played games before would talk about how great it is, and how 'innovative'.
Nanu Nanu !
music lover since 1969
Haven't you people learned? As long as some company owns the rights / copyrights / whateverrights to something that could conceivably make them a friggen' ***DIME*** - maybe not now, maybe not in 10 years, but at some distant point in the future, most companies CAN and WILL "protect" their intellectual property.
If you're going to make a mod based on other people's junk, you better be prepared to go underground, or release it from some country that doesn't give a frack about WIPO - and then hope you never visit a country that participates in WIPO, because you will be blackbagged and locked up just because you dared pay homage to something you really took an interest in.
*Subject is in reference to the Aliens: Total Conversion Doom mod that was shutdown by Fox Studios, as one of the first corporate shutdowns of a fan's work that I remember in the game scene.
OK, do I understand this correctly, this was about fan-created maps and skins for Halo? This is a complete change of direction for Bungee, the creator of Halo. Bungee always encouraged user mods and maps for the earlier products like Marathon, they even released their internal development tools to assist users in creating maps and mods, even releasing the source code once the product was well obsolete. And now that Bungee is owned by Microsoft, they are stomping on user-created mods? You would think that even a monopoly like Microsoft would recognize the value of devoted fans that enhance their product, that's what made Bungee into a property worth acquiring in the first place. But no, they view Halo as a property to leverage against the competition, it's just another tool of the monopoly. That's why Halo is no longer available on the Mac, even though it was originally developed for the Mac. Now Bungee products are XBox first, PC second, Mac never.
Now this is probably unlikely... But I know the Halo game concept started out as a RTS, and Bungie later decided to scrap the project, and make an FPS out of the universe they were creating. Perhaps that is what inspired these modders to start their project. But beyond the fact that MS and Bungie woudl make no money from a Halo mod for C&C, you have to look at the possibility that they are acting in advance to protect themselves from loosing money in the future... It would not be a stretch of the imagination to think that one of Bungies current secret developents, or an already planned future development is in-fact a Halo RTS game!
My hand touched her hand. Her hand touched her boob. By the transitive property, I got some boob! Algebra is awesome!
I think Microsoft is a game company, since the only decent software they ever released were games. As mentioned by others they don't want a rival RTS to profit from one of their games. Specifically in the field of RTS, they released many excellent games. Sometimes you even needed to run one of those real-time strategy games to make their crappy operating sytem stable. I don't know whether there are other examples, but I did use virus98 as OS at some point and it ran stable when playing Age Of Empires II, but crashed often when not playing that game, even when in idle mode.
Unlike Microsoft and Fox Interactive, Epic Games embraces its Mod community wholeheartedly. They encourage them rather than discourage them and have never ever requested that any project be stopped. In fact, Epic includes a majority of the tools mod developers need with every copy of Unreal Tournament, UT2k3 and most recently UT2k4. UT2k7 will be no exception to this whatsoever. Epic and Nvidia even hold annual mod developer competitions with millions of dollars in price money and computer equipement to be awarded to the winning project.
Valve is pretty much the same way, and in fact they allow mod developers to actually SELL their mods via Steam. Microsoft and others need to get with the program.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Maybe they could do as Dune Legacy did, remove the content and include an extractor so you could move over "intellectual properties" yourself:
1 7705
Several people has earlier questioned the distribution of the dune2 data files as they are not free.
Due to this these files has now been removed and work has been started on the extractor which will automaticall extract data from Dune2.
This will prevent copyright issues and also decrease the size of data needed to be distributed a lot.
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=5
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
Blizzard has known about them for at least a year and hasn't sent a C&D yet. The PR folks are trying to make sure it won't happen. For starters, you'll need WC3:ROC, WC3:TFT, StarCraft, and BroodWar to even install the mod. It's not like people are going to be able to grab it for free instead of buying StarCraft. And it's not as if Blizzard has anything to loose by letting people translate StarCraft into 3D by using the WC3 engine. I mean, even if/when StarCraft 2 comes out, it's not going to be a simple 3D conversion. I mean, it better not be.
I'm pretty sure that was the only C&C game set in the future(no, Generals doesn't count, and C&C3 doesn't count until it's released--it's a sequel to TS anyways) although the other games did have some sci-fi-like units(time travel and laser beams, for example). But yeah, a Halo RTS will be pretty much the same derivative crap the rest of Halo is.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
If only this happened to Microsoft for the "invention" of windows v1, 2, 3, 3.1, 95, NT or any of the other variants!
"I'm sorry but the idea of a mouse and windows is copyright by Xerox"
Imagine how cool our computers could be today!!
Apparently you never heard of a little game called "GoldenEye 007".
Halo sold around 6 million copies, 5 million in North America, meaning it really didn't have much impact outside the USA.
GoldenEye, on the other hand, sold around 8 million copies, wich is quite a bit more than Halo. And Im not even sure if GoldenEye is the most successful console FPS ever.
Also, if what makes a game successful in your eyes is not the actual number of copies sold, but its success with the critics, Halo would still get its ass kicked by GoldenEye.
The only way I can imagine Halo beating GoldenEye is in the number of vocal fanboys on the internet.