24 replies to this topic

[BlackWare]

My name is Michael R Kirkpatrick,


Im the owner of a company that designs video games, but we also publish them. For those who dont know what publishing means in this area, we make business deals for the rights to games which we then host off of our site. Im giving anyone who is interested in publishing their game(please note this doesnt always mean money) an oppourtunity that is rather hard to pass up!

These are the rules:

You give us all your rights. Concept art, Models, Animations, Sounds, Gameplay, Maps, and anything else that deals with the game in itself is given to us(This most definately includes the game source).

If the game is pre-compiled, please make sure it is with a non open-source game engine and that the game is finished.

We accept unfinished games past 50% completion. most of the time, assuming its an FPS, 50% is a few maps, a few models, camera angle right, and most 2D Art(say, for interface) finished. We PREFER 100% done.

We also are looking mainly for Multiplayer online games. We will accept campaign/standalone games but this is only for certian acceptions.

And please, as some people try, we will know if youve stolen the game from somewhere else. Thanks!

Any questions please EMail Mike.Kirkpatrick53@Gmail.com



~Michael Kirkpatrick

[Sol_HSA]

BlackWare said:

For those who dont know what publishing means in this area, we make business deals for the rights to games which we then host off of our site.

This site being?

[alphadog]

BlackWare said:

I'm giving anyone who is interested in selling their game(please note this doesnt always mean money) an oppourtunity that is rather hard to pass up!

sell verb, sold, sell·ing, noun
–verb (used with object)
1. to transfer (goods) to or render (services) for another in exchange for money; dispose of to a purchaser for a price: He sold the car to me for $1000.

If your (re)definition of selling does not involve money, what else could I get for my hard-worked content? Bushels of wheat? Goats? A promissory note of forty virgins when I die and (presumably) go to Heaven?

[starstutter]

alphadog said:

Bushels of wheat? Goats? A promissory note of forty virgins

Just don't send them all in one box. The goat will eat the wheat and the virgins will eat the goat. I think fed-ex probably has insurance now for that though.

[BlackWare]

Ok selling can also mean trading. Such as money, i trade money for an item, just as i might trade you something your interested in for your game. Selling and trading are essentially the same thing in the aspect im using it as. Please stay on topic.

The company's website is not currently open to the public, if you decide to work with us you will be informed of the website after signing an agreement. We currently do not want others looking into us as we are a new company and do not wished to be known until we have a decent variety of games for the community to play.

Once again by selling i meant a business deal that might involve a tradeof sorts. Trade could also be you give us the game and its rights, we give you a certian percentage of what the game makes for a certian period of time. In this idea yes your making money but its a trading system, not a buying/selling system.

For your hard work you COULD be offered money, but also a percentage it makes for a certian amount of time, maybe a partnership. Some people have given the game up solely because they cannot work on it anymore and would rather a higher company to develop it. Other times people want a certian material item(within reason). Most of the time, however, it will be the percentage deal. You get(as example) 30% of the money your game makes for 1 year. This could get you 50$ a month, it could get you 5000$ a week. It all depends but thats most likely the deal that will be made. Weve also seen quite a few partnerships(as example) you still work on the game, i lend my team to help work on your game, then the game is hosted off our website with both company's names on the game, so rights are distributed betweeen our company and yours.

I would also like to add, which i will put into the first post, we highly highly prefer online multiplayer games. We will, however, accept standalone games on certian acceptions.

[starstutter]

BlackWare said:

Ok selling can also mean trading. Such as money, i trade money for an item, just as i might trade you something your interested in for your game. Selling and trading are essentially the same thing in the aspect im using it as.

Trading for what? No one is going to even consider giving up their years of hard work for something that isn't gaurenteed or even predictably valuble.

Quote

The company's website is not currently open to the public, if you decide to work with us you will be informed of the website after signing an agreement. We currently do not want others looking into us as we are a new company and do not wished to be known until we have a decent variety of games for the community to play.

I'm not a manager, nor do I have much experience in running businesses, but "hiding" your site from the public is a lousy way to gain clients. That's just common sense. In the best case very few will hear about it, but you may get a few clients. In the worst case, you'll be viewed as a scam because here comes this publishing company that's offering to take your work for no gaurenteed compensation.

Quote

Once again by selling i meant a business deal that might involve a tradeof sorts. Trade could also be you give us the game and its rights, we give you a certian percentage of what the game makes for a certian period of time.

What the hell kind of trade is that? Thats something you do when you conquer a country, not open a business. Take a smaller percentage than the individual that has worked their ass off to make a quality product. It sounds like an extremley attractive offer that I spend all my free time on a game for the course of 2 years or more, and then give it to you so you can reap possibly all the profit, get the creative rights and have no obligation to return me any favors. I would be stunned if half your clients didn't file lawsuits.

Quote

I would also like to add, which i will put into the first post, we highly highly prefer online multiplayer games.

From small indie teams? Honestly... how much do you know about game development?

[starstutter]

Sol_HSA said:

This site being?

There is no site. I googled his information and got one result.
http://www.devmaster...ead.php?t=13132

Maybe I'm calling this pre-maturley, but if your going to run a business scam, game developers are a poor target.
.

[BlackWare]

its not a scam and all who think it is will obviously be shocked when were out and about.

As for you starstutter obviously your not interested in this deal so please stay out of this thread. All your doing is making us look bad and seem like a scam when i 100% assure you it is not. We are looking to make an internet publishing site and a network/corporation(best example, NHN Corp AKA http://www.ijji.com). Were just giving people who may have never thought about doing something like this an oppourtunity.

Star, with all due respect unless you have a game, are interested, and willing to make some sort of deal I ask you to stay away from this thread.

As for the points you made, none of them are valid. To you maybe, but in the business world it works much worse than im giving. There have been companies give people 5% of overall game profit for 6 months, and they make a hell of a lot of money. I Might just offer you 80%, i might offer 40%, maybe 75%. It depends on what me and my team decide is a fair offer. If you say no you say no, no harm no foul. If you say yes great, you just made a profit off of your game that some people might not have even thought about doing. We host the games ourselves. We pay for domains, servers, hosting and advertising, events, prizes, employees. Theres many many people who cant afford any of that, and therefor half the time cant even make money off their game. If they sign the game off to us, at least they made a profit off their hard work.


And about the website and information you "googled," we had a previous company name that was changed to BlackWare, you wont find anything using the information i listed on this site. You also didnt do a good job because "BlackWare" is also a name of another company that sells ink for printers(http://www.blackware.com) so your not very good at research. The reason we havent release our website to the public is because, ONCE AGAIN, were new. The site isnt ready for public traffic yet, its jut a site for my team and the company's games.

[starstutter]

BlackWare said:

All your doing is making us look bad and seem like a scam when i 100% assure you it is not.

That's really why I said "Maybe I'm calling this pre-maturley". I would bet around 4000 (or much more) internet scams are started every day and people are aware of that, so naturally they're suspicious of people claiming to start for-profit companies with no proof of their existance or credibility.

Look, I don't have a hope that this is a scam or anything and there are a shortage of indie publishers so I honeslty hope this is a sincere effort. I don't have definitive proof that this is a scam so I can't call it that. All I can say is that before I even said anything meaningful, 2 others had the same feelings, so it's not that I'm "making you look bad", I just evidently have the same feelings as others.

I guess my suggestion is get some tangible proof up and don't make references non-existant sites (yes, the link is a dead end as well). Frankly, I hope you're a legitimate company, but I don't have to "make you look like a scam" because you're doing a very good job of that yourself.

EDIT: yes, I saw the blackware site, but I had the abillity to reason that you didn't sell mail-room automation software.

[imerso]

Well, I agree with people's arguments about this "opportunity". There are tons of scams every day, and there are some signals that we programmers are very sensitive about: free e-mail accounts, no websites, no search engine references, unknown money, etc.

You *may* be serious about what you're talking here, but... oh well. Back to code.

[BlackWare]

vrness and starstutter i understand what your saying and like i said im a very young person, im only 17 myself. This kind of shit is rather hard to do especially with scams that sound just as good as the real thing roaming around. So ill tell you what I can:

Weve purchased http://www.black-ware.net for the domain of the site(registrar takes 24 hours to complete but once its finished we will put a construction sign up). Currently i have a webhost, we are using http://www.siteground.com. Currently the only game we have is X Online, the game my team is making. The game is a FPS/TPS/IAS Multiplayer Online 3D Game. The reason I Came here was because people like variety and when I started making games, I remember how difficult it was to get them off of their feet, i didnt make a profit off of any of them, eventually just giving them away. So I want to help those who have huge talent in their feilds but dont have anyone willing to make a deal for their games such as I did long ago.

Aside from that i have many concept artists, one of them is a girl from DeviantArt.com, her profile is her: http://www.bunnyartist.deviantart.com and the only weorks she listed specifically for the game on her site has been http://bunnyartist.d...Knight-94875271 . I am RememberGenosha on DeviantArt. I also have modellers, coders, etc. but I dont think i need to list everyone on the team for you. Our main plan is to bring X Online to IGF in 2009.

Mainly though i want the community to have a variety of games. Ijji.com has rpgs, puzzles, flash games, fps's, all of it. I want to have just as wide a variety so our community has as much fun as possible at the website while visitng.

Once again, Star this goes for you mainly as you seem to be the most eager to catch little snippets and im sure at this point you have at least half-way developed a game, send me an email at Mike.Kirkpatrick53@Gmail.com and we can talk more in depth about this, but im not giving everything away publicly, ive given as much as i can.

If you still think this is a scam obviously I cant convince you but I cant stress how much this isnt, I mean would i really try this hard to get an indie game on this site alone when 1)theres probably a hundred other sites just as good and 2)when i just gave out so much information?

[starstutter]

Really man, I'm not trying to fight with you here. As you get more in depth it sounds a little more plausible, but understand that you just made a really bad first impression. I think the main thing that set off peoples alarms is that you were trying to market a plan of informal agreements as a formal business plan, which (and not saying you're running one) is probably the biggest flag for a business scam.

So anyway, I don't have a specific game developed, but I'm an engine technology writer and I've been working on a learning experience project called Spyke Engine that I'm hoping I can someday release as a next-gen engine perhaps in mid-late 2009.

Sorry if I came off as strong, but you've got to understand this from our prespective. As developers who are constantly on the internet, we see scammers all the time looking to make a quick buck and really screw people over. So a wrong wording or bad first impression is a good way to quickly get labeled as one.

EDIT: being a little more specific, and as said above, it's dangerous to present yourself as a formal business when you have no current assets or even a website. If you were to present the concept and extend a partnership offer, that would be a much better way to go about it.

[BlackWare]

well ill take that into consideration. Once im finished with the construction site ill let everyone know, ill be releasing 5 flash games on it so you can mess around on the site for your troubles of visiting. As for your engine i say good luck but its a huge project, my main C/C++ coder tried and stopped. He was making an engine that could make a game in any language that holds .lid or .dll files(any language out there basically). This was revoutionary but too much for one man to bite off so he stopped. Now were looking into the KJapi engine.

And im not trying to fight either, rather defend myself.

[Reedbeta]

BlackWare said:

He was making an engine that could make a game in any language that holds .lid or .dll files(any language out there basically). This was revoutionary but too much for one man to bite off so he stopped.

I hate to tell you but that is really not revolutionary. Using a .dll to provide the game code is an idea that has been around for at least 10 years. For example, the original Half-Life engine worked this way; people made mods by substituting their own DLLs (and art assets) for the shipped ones.

[BlackWare]

no i understand but no engine has been made like that lol. As in i could code in php, java, javascript, c/c++, D, Delphi, python, XML, C#, .NET, VB, Pawno, Perl, i could go on forever. Its not that the idea hasnt been out there its that he was making an engine that supported all languages that hasnt been done before.

[Reedbeta]

PHP, Java, Javascript, Python, Perl, and many other languages just don't compile to DLLs at all, so no, it wouldn't support anything like all languages. (By the way, XML isn't actually a programming language.) I'm not sure whether you could make compatible DLLs with a .NET languages (C# and VB). And even with Half-Life, although it was designed to work with C/C++, you could probably make it work with D or Delphi if you wanted to, as those languages offer binary compatibility with C.

[Sol_HSA]

BlackWare said:

vrness and starstutter i understand what your saying and like i said im a very young person, im only 17 myself.

Let's say I've done a kickass game, and want to make money out of it. Let's see what my choices would be.

1. Try to pitch it to a Big Publisher. Maybe I get lucky. Most likely not.

2. Sell it myself, through my own site, bunch of portals; if I'm good enough, I'll get it on steam, and get rich. Then I'd port it to xbox live arcade, ps3 marketplace, and wiiware for further piles of money.

3. Give the rights to the game to some 17-year old with no track record for a promise of a small percentage of profits.

Hmm. I wonder.

[BlackWare]

to be honest a lot of people cant sell it themselves. using my preferences, youd need a 200$/month dedicated server, a high traffic webserver(around 40$/month, i went with unlimited everything), youd need to pay for advertising and such too. Plus assuming you only know C/C++, you now need someone to make your website for you(dont want to look noobish by using a free one), probably have to pay him too, then you need to pay to copyright the game and also a company, plus international copyrights to host your site over the internet(if you dont do that anyone can take it without you saying anything) as well, and thats just the surface. Theres a lot more expenses need to be payed, all together most average close to 2000$ to start just 1 game in a decent direction(People such as Bungie and Microsoft spend close to 75,000USD). Honestly your not realizing how much were prepared to spend for your game, and still give you some of the profits. Im not asking anyone to say yes just giving you an oppourtunity. If you don't want to take it don't, im not going to hassle someone for something they dont want to give me. But in all reality JUST to give you game a good start alone, youd need to spend from 2,000-10,000$ which is what im prepared to spend to get your game in the right track, and you still make money off of it.

[alphadog]

BlackWare said:

youd need a 200$/month dedicated server, a high traffic webserver(around 40$/month, i went with unlimited everything), youd need to pay for advertising and such too.

Uhm, no. For an average MMO, you don't need to pay anywhere near that much. There are plenty of luxury services for half that, and lots of good hosting providers for under three digits. Also, if you plan properly, you scale up from shared (as cheap as $20/mo) up to VPS, up to dedicated, up to clustered. As you grow, if done properly, the margins become absolutely and relatively fatter.

Website? A total non-issue. Maybe $5/mo tops if you do it on a separate service/box.

The one thing I don't know would be bandwidth costs, but again, a well-built, lean MMO should be able to pay for itself by the time bandwidth becomes a concern.

BlackWare said:

Plus assuming you only know C/C++, you now need someone to make your website for you(dont want to look noobish by using a free one)

Most developers can't make good websites. However, many game designers can, or know someone who can.

BlackWare said:

then you need to pay to copyright the game

No. Assuming you are in a country covered by the Berne Conventions, copyright assignment is automatic as soon as the Work takes on a tagible/published form.

Registration can optionally be done within the first five years, and is only useful (and, not necessary) in a court of law.

BlackWare said:

and also a company

This is true. You should form a company at some point around launch, if you are serious.

It is not expensive, however. Maybe $500-3000 per year in various fees and filings, depending on state. That's for a corporation. LLC are nice and cheap, are perfect for small shops, and offer almost as much asset protection.

But, this would only be necessary for, again, legal protection should anyone elect to sue you because of your game. This is advisable, although I've been told that if you incorporate a one- or two-man shop, a really good lawyer can still sometimes "pierce the corporate veil" and seize your personal assets (like your house). See "liability in tort".

BlackWare said:

plus international copyrights to host your site over the internet

Uhm. Again, not necessary. Berne Conventions.

BlackWare said:

But in all reality JUST to give you game a good start alone, youd need to spend from 2,000-10,000$ which is what im prepared to spend to get your game in the right track, and you still make money off of it.

That's a great goal and philosophy. Lots of people fail because they chase the 100% and get 0%. Instead, if you share fairly, all walk away with a win they otherwise would not have had. I've used similar concepts with plenty of people to great success. Basically, you may want to research "angel investing" for some tips and practices...

But, for both sides, make sure you dot all your ayes and cross your tees before getting in a deal like this with anyone. Not to rag on you, but admitting being 17 makes your collection of posts a little more understandable.

Don't get me wrong. You have lots of ambition for a 17-year old, but nothing beats experience in the world of business. I can already see some holes in your practices that could land a ten-ton truck of legal crap for you and/or your clients.

Good luck, and I hope you launch many games.

[Reedbeta]

BlackWare said:

you now need someone to make your website for you(dont want to look noobish by using a free one)

On the contrary, there are plenty of very professional-looking free templates out there. I used one for my website, for instance. Does it seem noobish to you?