Quote:
Originally Posted by inm8#2
I hope this kickstarter is a big stepping stone toward Jane acquiring the GK rights.
I'm not well versed in the legality of publishing rights or whatever rights they are called, but Activision confuses me. They own the rights to a certain franchise which hasn't been tapped in 13 years. They have no plans to do anything with it. So, why hold on? Why not sell off the rights to someone who will take care of the franchise while you stick to making your Call of Duty games?
Just doesn't make sense other than holding onto a lottery ticket you never plan on cashing.
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They agreed to license King's Quest to Telltale, so they're not entirely against doing anything with their old Sierra properties. But even just starting negotiations has a cost to them: they need to figure out exactly what the property is (what trademarks, how many games, tie-in novels, etc.), they need to establish how much money they're currently making off it (by selling the games on GOG, etc.), see if they couldn't have a motivation to revive the series themselves now or in the future, see if they couldn't get a better offer from someone else, see if someone releasing new GK games wouldn't risk competing with their own games, and, based on all these considerations, decide if they want to sell and what price they want to put on it.
Just doing that means diverting lawyers, marketing people and executives from what they should normally be doing to examine those questions, and therefore has a cost. If the person asking about the rights is just an individual who's likely to just end up saying "sorry, that's too expensive for me", I completely understand why they wouldn't be willing to even start looking into it. If it's a reasonably-successful company, however, then I guess they might be more willing to study the offer.
