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NASA's Educational Game Proposal Deadline Extended

Posted by timothy on from the there-must-be-lasers dept.

NASA MMO Team writes "Due to the additional time required to respond to the number of questions that were raised during the NASA Massively Multiplayer Online Educational Game RFP Briefing held on April 21, 2008 in Baltimore, MD, we have decided to extend the RFP Proposal response date to Monday, July 21, 2008 at 12:00 midnight EDT. ... Please contact the NASA Learning Technologies Project Office at mmo@nasa.gov with any additional questions." (NASA has set up a site with additional information on the NASA MMO Education Game project, too.)

3 of 17 comments (clear)

  1. Nobody applied by CogDissident · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, NASA is requiring that people build an MMORPG and be unable to sell it. And the reward for the people making it? You get "limited brand placement".

    So, you get to make a game to popularize NASA, but you can't sell it, and you can only make money off of brand placement. Oh, and it gets better. You also have to stick to deadlines that NASA sets, and the entire end product is subject to their approval.

    I can't imagine why there are not hundreds of companies applying to give all of their development time to a project that will make almost no return on investment. Investors love giving away money for free based on vague promises and loss of control of their own product!

    1. Re:Nobody applied by everphilski · · Score: 3, Informative

      No, you are not getting paid to build a MMO that you can re-sell **to other customers**. That's the key behind the non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement (NRSAA). Namely, you get to keep what you make and you can re-sell it. If NASA was paying for it (reimbursable space act agreement), you'd owe them a deliverable that would become their property, and you would have no further profitability off of the MMO. But under the NRSAA, you get to keep the property you developed, and you can utilize it to profit in other areas.

      So you could either use an existing in-house framework, or build up a new framework for this Nasa MMO, and then profit by creating a new MMO or selling a MMO toolkit. There are paths to profitability, they aren't extremely clear, but chances are if you do a good job you can make more than the $3M they initially put up anyways...

    2. Re:Nobody applied by Nasajin · · Score: 2, Informative

      1. expend thousands of man-hours on creating MMORPG 2. give MMORPG to NASA 3. ??? 4. !profit