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EVE Online Developers Help Player Make Fan Movie
Enfors writes "CCP, developers of the sci-fi MMOG EVE Online, continue to impress with their open attitude towards players. In a thread on the EVE forums, an EVE Online player named Dire Lauthris describes difficulties he was having while making a fan movie that would illustrate a portion of EVE Online's background story. To make it 'historically correct,' he contacted CCP, the developers, to check on some facts. Instead of threatening to sue him for infringing on their intellectual property, they ended up inviting him to their offices to set him up with better movie-making software than the one he was using. Also, they had an employee record the narrator voice for his movie. The movie is now finished and available online. Massively is running a related article about storytelling in EVE."
My guess (and I thought it was commonly believed) that the reason Square did that was because they were already making their own remake for the DS and they didn't want sales cannibalized.
Whether that's the real reason or not, I'd say that's a bad example of properties that are just being sat on, since well... it wasn't.
Pretty cool. Someday I'd like to see an entire movie done in machinima that uses different games depending on the scenes. Something with space battles filmed in EVE, ground battles in an RTS, and then some close up action and everything else using an FPS engine (source is pretty good for machinima). Would be neat.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
You are not their intended audience. At minimum, you need to have visited CCP's website once, and preferably tried the game.
- These characters were randomly selected.
I think the point of Playboy is the do-it-yourself ethic.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
http://www.eveonline.com/download/videos/Default.asp?a=download&vid=229
It should be no mystery why CCP would help a fan who was taking the game's back story seriously. Eve's back story makes that of Magic: The Gathering look like "The Brothers Karamazov."
Now, I'm a huge Eve fan -- huge -- but the whole set-up, like that of the great tabletop space opera game that preceded it, "Battletech," is merely a balsa wood framework designed to prop up as many reasons for different races to be at war with each other as possible. Eve is to Science Fiction what Everquest is to fantasy.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Abandonware does exist. It's not relevant to this discussion though.
Various games and books go out of print. Sometimes they become difficult to find or expensive. Is the original publisher harmed if I pirate it instead of buying it for a lot of money? Probably not.
Then again, most IP is a load of BS IMHO. Would the world be a worse place if anyone could make a chrono trigger sequel? Probably not. Consumers would get used to looking for the original brand names if they cared about authentic.