The renewal of stonehearth

[soviet raccoon]

So. Stonehearth was bought out by riot. The devs have completely abandoned it and most the modding community is gone too. Does anyone know if riot owns the rights? or when there gonna run out? Since me and my group have loved stonehearth pretty heavily. It even got me and my partner together. We are completely willing to re-write stonehearths code. build it from the ground up. no more hearthlings idling, no more buildings crashing your game, no more black screen on load. probably more scaffolding problems. The reason i say this is because we found an incredible amount of problems with lua. i say this all because if anyone has any information on how we could get our hands on the rights to stone hearth. were willing to get it back out there with all the things it should have had.

[Guillaume]

The rights belong probably to riot, since they bought the studio radiant. You can head to the online Forum[discourse.stonehearth.net] or to the ACE Discordserver[discord.gg] to ask the members there, maybe they know more.

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Stalin kun:

So. Stonehearth was bought out by riot. The devs have completely abandoned it and most the modding community is gone too. Does anyone know if riot owns the rights? or when there gonna run out? Since me and my group have loved stonehearth pretty heavily. It even got me and my partner together. We are completely willing to re-write stonehearths code. build it from the ground up. no more hearthlings idling, no more buildings crashing your game, no more black screen on load. probably more scaffolding problems. The reason i say this is because we found an incredible amount of problems with lua. i say this all because if anyone has any information on how we could get our hands on the rights to stone hearth. were willing to get it back out there with all the things it should have had.

You don't need the rights to the game to do that -- if you're building code, assets and everything else from the ground up, then you'd be making a "spiritual successor inspired by Stonehearth", not using the IP. Get your team together and make something... I genuinely wish you the best of luck in trying to do as a passion project what a team of experienced professionals with millions of dollars of funding + backing of one of the largest gaming powerhouses in the world wasn't quite able to pull off.

Yes, RIOT owns the rights; and no, they're not going to sell them (that's not how Riot operates -- they acquired Stonehearth's dev studio for the talent of its dev team and the tech they were working on, which is a key ingredient in Riot's upcoming fighting game, since Stonehearth is partly a proof-of-concept for that tech there is no way that Riot is going to share until well after they have the patent for that tech locked down tight.)

If you want to gather some goodwill for your project though, a couple of tips: starting out by saying "the devs completely abandoned it" and "the modding community is gone too" is neither factually accurate, nor helpful; the modding community has been a lot quieter lately but we've all had this small 2-year global pandemic to worry about so maybe they've had some bigger issues to deal with? And the dev team are still contact-able, they've frequently offered ACE team support in the past, and in fact you might still be able to talk to some of them on the ACE discord... if someone wanted to try making Stonehearth 2 (even under a different name with no official link to the original, built from the ground up) then I'm absolutely certain that being able to talk to the original devs and learn from their experience and mistakes would be a helpful resource.

[Eagle_of_Fire]

The devs never even actually abandoned this game. Just reading this I'm not willing to continue this conversation.