An E-mail from Ryan confirms my suspicions

[Nek'rahm]

I think we should begin to set up our own version of Uru. My reason is a recent e-mail to Cyan on an idea I had for Uru CC to go to Wii. Here was his response:

*
Thanks for the note and we appreciate the thoughts and ideas.

At this point, it's not as much as what we'd like to do or ideas we
have, but what other companies will pay us for. At this point, no one
would be willing to pay for the expansion pack content to the Wii.

Thanks for writing,
ryan
*

This makes me think that Cyan won't be able to restart Uru, even with the rights from GameTap. It is from this that I suggest we at least get things started so we can make a smoother transition after the shutdown.

What do you guys think?

[BAD]

I think your misinterpreting his words.

He is not saying they won't be able to do something with Uru, he is saying that it is not within Cyan's power to port the game to other systems. That would require either a large amount of interest in the idea, or a company approaching them to buy the rights to do it.

Be careful not to over extend the meaning of things. We don't need to do anything until we are more sure of what the situation will be. If we jump the gun, we could waste a lot of work, or worse overstep our legal bounds and get some people in a lot of trouble.

BAD

[Aloys]

It's pretty clear that Uru Live is dead, it's been shutdown twice, no publisher will pay for a project that has already failed twice. Especially such a big and expensive project.
Now IMO to us (the GoW, not the community at large) the two most important remaining questions are:

1) Will there be some form of IC closure of the story?
2) Will there be a relaunch of UU or something similar?

[greendragoon]

I think your misinterpreting his words.
He is not saying they won't be able to do something with Uru, he is saying that it is not within Cyan's power to port the game to other systems.
BAD

I agree, porting Uru over to any other system would be a huge undertaking. Remember how much work it was for them to port Uru over to the new version of Plasma. Personally, I'm hoping to something along the lines of Until Uru + Cyan's blessing on adding fan ages. If Uru is to be saved, I think it will be the community that will have to do it.

[belford]

Seems to me that if we want to plan a fan-run Uru game, we're accepting the risk of wasting our effort from day one. Because it might not get done. If you're terrified by the thought of planning work which falls through, run far far away.

Also seems to me that planning is the fun part. There will be plenty of hard tedious work to put off, later on.

[Aloys]

Where starting a fan project there's always a risk of seeing it fail. 9 times out of 10 is because of motivation, as it's the only thing fueling it.
And of course the bigger the project and the more people involved the bigger the risk is.. The only other real risks are the technical and legal aspects. Legal stuff, can (and must) be taken care of at the start. Technical stuff comes down to the skills of everyone and proper ambition management..
But that doesn't mean that such project shouldn't be at least attempted. Even if the project itself isn't completed, it can still bring a lot of good things. For one, it allows all the people involve to develop their respective skills. And of course it should bring fun to everyone.
What it shouldn't bring however to the other people not involved in the development (commonly refered to as 'the audience' )is false hopes, or excessive expectations..
The most important thing (and the most difficult) is to make sure right from the start what is the degree of motivation of each and all participants.

[Grogyan]

Sounds to me its in the context as its written from a business point of view, MOUL recouped some old players, but the rest fled to other MMO's.

Wii is a completely different OS that Cyan would have to spend a lot of time to recode, which takes money.
The PS3 however is a glorified PC, except for the Cell process, same story,
XBox 360 is a probable candidate, as most of the OS infrastructure is based on DirectX anyway

Put it this way, if I were in a profitable business, i'd pay for the servers, setup cost, subscriptions backbone, but where all proceeds would go to Cyan, and 10% I would take, this would give Cyan to really show off, but prior to signing the deal, i'd put a clause in that integrating user created content take priority over in house Ages.

Unfortunately for GameTap, they didn't see it this way, but at least they forked out enough for 1 year of gameplay, and come back 12 months later to assess the revenue generated, and it wasn't up to par.

[Goofy]

The biggest cost to cyan to just run URUlive is paying for the bandwith that URUlive would use. I'm sure they have other servers that they maintain and another server shouldn't add anymore cost then the servers they already have.

All I got from that response is that no other company out there would pay for such a thing. Also about clearing up loose ends in Mystonline story. I believe Graydragon said if they did that it wouldnt alow them to continue or something like that. Can't find the exact qoute.

[BAD]

I never said I feared our work would be for nothing. Right now most of the work we have done is usable no matter what happens. We have already gone very far into the avenues we have discussed in previous topics.

My point was that we shouldn't accelerate our plans just because of a vague interpretation that Cyan is dumping Uru forever. I have tonnes of experience with rushed work. Plainly, it sucks. It's never as good as you want, and always makes future endeavorers harder. I don't want anyone here to start feeling rushed, nor get caught up in a frenzy because of false alarms.

I have already said in one thread that we should wait for the closure, wait a month, and then begin serious work on what ever plan we finally agree on. Then after a few months we announce what we are doing and gauge from there the rest of our course.

Till then we should keep upgrading our software, creating, creating, creating, and um........what was the last thing?.......OH yeah! Creating!

[Aloys]

My big fear is that after Live's closure we won't have anymore online Uru fun in any form. I may be wrong, but I'm under the impression that they want to let Uru go for good. (I've said it before,I think it's the right thing to do for them). And with that in mind, so far there is no indication that Cyan will start any UU endeavour, and although we could run our own servers we would first need to get legal clearance from them and again, I don't think that'll be easy.
But what I fear the most is that if there is no more official involvement from Cyan (UU or similar) then the community will die. It might take a while but it will happen; slowly it will dissolve with time. There's just no way around that: no more game, no more community. We can throw all kinds of arguments at it, that's just the way it is. And what is the point of getting to work on a big project if whenever it is completed no one is here to play it?... Well, there are still valid reasons to do it, but you need a much bigger motivation. Call me a pessimitic, but I've seen that happen all too often..

Bottom line: the best thing that can happen is that Cyan let Uru and D'ni go, but not its community. Hope that they release UU again (or something along that line), or that they give us total legal clearance to do anything to develop a fan game, including using their IP and using old UU material (binaries/source etc) to our leisure.
Of course I say all this not having a clue about what is the exact legal mumbo jumbo with GT and the 'rights'.