Slashdot Mirror
Square Enix Shuts Down Fan-Made Chrono Trigger Sequel
KIllagouge writes "Just days before the release of Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes, SquareEnix sent a Cease & Desist letter to Chrono Compendium to stop everything to do with Crimson Echoes. People might remember when they did this with Chrono Resurrection. Seems to be the growing trend; instead of listening to their fans, which would net them even more money, game developers continue to lock down old gaming IP. A copy of the C&D letter is available online."
The fan project had been in development since 2004 and was 98% complete.
No, not at all. Your handle is indeed apt, sir.
The argument is that a merchandise so popular fans make unofficial sequels is one that you can easily produce titles for and sell them to make money.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
So I looked at the fan-made sequel... it's a ROM hack. Not that I really have anything against such modifications, they do encourage people to pirate the game (search Google for a ROM, get the game illegally!), especially since hardware to legitimately dump the ROM images are expensive and rare enough that it's unlikely even the mod authors have them.
Square Enix has quite a legitimate case here and I understand it much better than if they shut down a project making a game from scratch (eg, a typical PC game).
Step 1: Find Copyrighted work
Step 2: Create derivative work without appropriate agreements/contracts
Step 3: Get sent cease and deist letter
Come on guys, wake up. This is someone else's work, you obviously misjudged the company you are dealing with. Why not start something from scratch, so that you don't end up in a situation like this.
Never heard of them
I can make do without their game. Can they make do without my money?
So far, so good.
And he's saying that argument does not have any logical/statistical/whatever evidence to back it up, thus making it an empty opinion.
Any idea how much an original Chrono Trigger fetches? Do you know how many people bought it originally (SNES)... the second time (PSX)... and the third time (DS)?
Then there's Chrono Cross. Care to take a shot at how many purchased that game? It made the "Best Seller" reprint list.
Square-Enix could make a king's fortune selling a third Chrono game. They know this... we've been begging (literally) for another Chrono game. But no... S-E is too busy milking the Final Fantasy cow to really care. Who wants a turn-based RPG anymore? It's all about the flashy graphics and real-time combat.
By the by, S-E, how's that mumorpurger of yours going?
Put simply, if they released another one, we'd buy it in a heartbeat (well, maybe not so much now). We don't make fangames or listen to symphony orchestras perform the music of those games because we hate 'em...
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
It always seems the "IP"-holder sends a cease and desist letter when the project is nearly done, almost like they want to cause as much pain as possible to the people trying to remake something.
What frustrates me most is that these projects then aren't worked on to completion and then simply distributed by anonymous torrents, working for several years on something and then getting cut off at the last minute is simply a dick move.
... they only had it shut down because they are developing their own sequel, right?
Right?
No? Yeah, that's what I thought too.
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Replace X characters with new Y characters.
Is it still infringement?
Yes. It's a ROM hack, meaning that it uses most of the same computer program as the original game. Putting new characters in a non-free program doesn't make it not a non-free program.
I began to write a rather angry email to Square Enix after reading the articles. However, halfway through, I realized where they might be coming from.
They have a DS version of Chrono Trigger that was first released at the end of 2008, and is still fairly "new" around the world. If people download the original ROM in order to hack it, or through CT:Crimson Echoes find out that they can easily play CT for free, the DS version might lose those potential sales.
Personally, I think the value of free advertisement and brand recognition that CT:CE would have given Square Enix would outweigh this. I also believe those people who buy the DS version do so for other reasons, such as portability. But I do see where Square Enix is coming from, and why they chose to stop the project now.
Yes... Square Enix should listen to their fans and release sequel with a crono x Magus love story! Heck there's plenty of relationships in the fanfics they could choose from. Frog x robo!
Just because fans want something doesn't mean you should do it . Yes Square could easily show off a cheaply made Chrono Trigger 2 for the DS and it would sell a ton of copies. However it would cheapen the brand unless it's a stellar game and they'd lose most goodwill to it.
Likewise giving fan made games like this a nod cheapens the brand.
It's not easy handling cult classics. You try to cash in on them and you just end up killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Look at Lucas Art's reputation for making games in the 90's. Look at their reputation now.
Sadly, that's the same thing people said about a Firefly movie, and yet...
There is a long and storied tradition of a huge fan upswell convincing a company to put for money on a project only for it to fail due to lack of actual sales when the time comes.
Where's the torrent?
I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
Off the top of my head without much thought:
Doom, Quake, Quake II, Quake 3, Half-life, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, Civ 4, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Battlefield 1942, World of Warcraft, STALKER, Oblivion, Morrowind, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Unreal Tournament (all) , Rainbow 6 (all), Warcraft III, The Sims
I'm sure if I put my mind to it I could come up with another hundred or so. While with some games the availability of mods is just a bit of icing on the cake of a good game with others like Neverwinter Nights or Oblivion the mods form a massive part of the experience.
Adventures created by the modding community kept NWN alive for years after release, paving the way for the sequel to be the success that it was. The Elder Scrolls games have also always had a very active modding community and knowing that when Oblivion came out made all the difference. Knowing that you can customise a game to your playing style, or that it will last months opposed to days due to player made maps and modifications can really sell a game. As well as extending the life of sales past the first couple of weeks after release.
Here's fourteen titles off the top of my head: Half-Life, Neverwinter Nights, Quake, Doom, Unreal, The Sims, Spore, Elder Scrolls, Civilization, Fallout 3, Bard's Tale, Lode Runner, Boulder Dash and Raid on Bungling Bay.
Some of those titles can be broken down into additional individual games (for example, The Sims was a significantly different game from The Sims 2, especially from a modding perspective) so this list could be expanded quite a bit. Some of them make modding a necessary part of their structure (Spore) and others wouldn't have garnered any attention at all if not for their mod tools (Raid on Bungling Bay) and others have just been outright owned by the mod community (Doom). And it's worth noting that even this short list of games represents a substantial portion of the entire market for video games on personal computers. The Sims and Half-Life alone have sold more games than the rest of the top ten list put together, and that includes World of Warcraft.
So, yes, modding is a significant factor in the success of "a lot" of great games on the PC.
Why doesn't Square Enix hire the developers and license it? If it is 98% complete, and it is decent, then it seems like everybody wins.
Square Enix has quite a legitimate case here and I understand it much better than if they shut down a project making a game from scratch (eg, a typical PC game).
I don't know well this peculiar ROM hack. But from the length of development time for the project and from the description (Same cast going into completely new adventures), I'm under the impression that they have almost completely redone a new game, creating new characters, writing new dialogues, etc...
Their only problem seems that they slapped all these new assets on the original engine as found in the ROM - the code and the sprites of the original cast are maybe the only thing left.
Given all the work already poured into the project, they could try to keep only the newly created assets.
Perhaps, if the ROM hack is as big as the delay and the information on the website let us think, it won't be that much complicated to remove the latest bit that tie the game to Square Enyx franchise :
- change the trademarked names
- create new sprites for the main cast
- use another engine. Preferably an open source one which is provably free of any S.E. content and can be audited. There are lots of open-source turn-based RPG engine. Given the popularity of Chrono Trigger, probably a couple of them can be configured to be close to that game's mechanics.
This will probably add another 2 years of development. But if this time S.E.'s lawyers clearly state what exactly caused the C&D letter and to what extent modification need to be made to make the project IP-law compliant, then the past 4-5 years that went into developing this will still give a result that the fan community will be able to enjoy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
How would that work when the patch differences are original creations? A derived work must contain some element from the original, and these patch files would not contain such. The patch files alone in a vaccuum, would be copyrighted by their respective authors, which in this case are the mod developers.
Patch modifications are legally sold everywhere for all sorts of products. If I wrote a set of instructions for how to turn your NES console into an x86 PC, I'm not violating your copyright because my instructions constitute an original piece of work. http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a-Nintendo-NES-PC/
I think the real issue here is how these mod developers went about announcing their work. They were loud and proud. Big mistake. Going by their page, they made it very confusing as to what they were distributing and who owns what and what's official and what's not. The liberal use of Square Enix trademarks was also a bad idea. Posting trailer videos on Youtube with title lines blurring ownership was an even worse idea. A boring link to a boring file share to a boring ASCII patch file named "CE.2009.patch" on a boring fan message board would have been the way to go.
These guys got slapped with a C&D because they were conducting business like kids jumping in a puddle splattering mud all over the place. Square Enix was forced to assert their non-association with these guys as well as continue to assert their ownership. The way I see it, they had no choice.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Why don't we put it this way: Chrono Trigger was more popular than Fallout. The sequel to Chrono Trigger was more popular than Fallout 2. We can reasonably assume that the sequel to the sequel to Chrono Trigger would be at least as popular as Fallout 3... which was a massive release.
You're arguing that Chrono Trigger is in a niche, like Firefly. He's arguing that it is a massively popular mainstream title. As somebody who was actually alive when CT first came out (which I do not suspect you were), I assure you that it wasn't a game only your nerdy friends had heard of. A CT sequel would sell like a Pokemon sequel or a new FF, despite your assertion it would sell like Wild Arms.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.