Worlds Adrift is closing down. Release the source code/assets

[A D L]

Let the community make something of it if you're not willing to keep hosting it.

This is a joke. You guys didn't even give the game a chance to live outside of early access. People stopped playing and were waiting for the end of early access because of the constant progression wipes. My whole group was going to play at launch and I'm sure we're not the only ones.

[RoReaver]

Originally posted by XPhiler:

Originally posted by The Romanian Reaver:

"or on a hosted server especially since there would be no revenue at the end of that road."
They can continue selling the game on Steam as a offline product. Don't white knight that hard as to miss the blatantly obvious.

You honestly believe people will continue buying in meaningful numbers a game that has been abandoned by the developers running on a extremely cut down private server (there is no way to emulate a cloud service like spacial OS without massive costs, not a question of knowledge or ability) thats marked as mostly negative on steam. And thats without considering piracy, no private server is going to make sure only legitimate clients connect, they have no way to even verify that. So yeah I stand by my assertion, there is nothing for them if they walk down that road monitarily. At best you could argue they'd save their reputation and maybe people will buy their future products, thats fair but that they'll profit from continuing sales? EXTREMELY unlikely.

You know what arguments from disbelief are. I told you to stop white knighting, next time I am gonna take it more seriously.

[Nar'Gall]

Addressing a few of the questions and ideas here:

1. Sell it to a 3rd party
It's hard to see why someone would buy a non-profitable game. Worlds Adrift doesn't make its money back by a multiplier, not a small margin. We invested in it more than 3X what it made in sales and still didn't manage to make it the game it should have been. A 3rd party wouldn't do better enough to close this massive gap. Regardless, we tried and discussed it with a few potential partners.

2. Release the game as source code
This was addressed before but will reinforce. Worlds, like many games, is partly built with third party tools, plugins and code without which it does not compile nor functions. We are not allowed to distribute these. If we started it as an Open Source to begin with, that wouldn't be the case -- but that's not the case. While it's possible to go back and strip all of this out, it would be necessary to reimplement it all in some other form. The amount of work is huge and not something we can do ourselves.

3. Make the servers available for hosting
Worlds Adrift's network was built on a proprietary technology, SpatialOS, that only runs within its own cloud environment. One must be a SpatialOS developer to run code in its platform, it cannot be done in personal servers. Running these servers have costs associated with it, and these costs are not compatible with the amount of players currently playing Worlds Adrift -- one of the reasons why it's being sunset at the end of July.

As you see, things are usually more complex than people want you to believe. If there was an easy solution, we would have taken it -- we have absolutely no problem making the game Open Source or enable people to host their own servers if we could do so. We are devs, but also players, and would like nothing better than that.

Unfortunately this is not the situation we find ourselves in, and suggesting otherwise adds nothing to the discussion nor helps in any way. =/

[RoReaver]

Originally posted by Nar'Gall:

While it's possible to go back and strip all of this out, it would be necessary to reimplement it all in some other form. The amount of work is huge and not something we can do ourselves.

Strip the proprietary parts and open source the remainder with a document describing what is missing and let whoever wants to pick up that task. Again this what the "people" you make mention of wanted to begin with considering you guys don't really care for your game's community enough to do that "huge" amount extra.

[76561198307836972]

Originally posted by Astra:

Nar'Gall, if there are no legal issues with the source code and assets, then it will be a community volunteers problem, isn't ?

Originally posted by Nar'Gall:

The amount of work is huge and not something we can do ourselves.

Originally posted by Nar'Gall:

we have absolutely no problem making the game Open Source or enable people to host their own servers if we could do so

I have also a question regarding the support. Was it already downed along with the forums?

If you're referring to customer support for Worlds we're still here to help > support.bossastudios.com

[MercGyver]

Your droppin support for the game so I must drop same support for your entire company. I shall never be scammed again by Bossa studios because I'll never buy another one of your games. I want a refund.

[♥ 色ボケ猫 ♥]

Why can't you strip the third party plugins, tools, and code from the source code and release the rest as open source?

Just leave notes indicating where the stripped plugin was and the general premise of what it did was and let the community do the rest....

All we are asking for is the chance...

[idc]

Originally posted by ♥ 色ボケ猫 ♥:

Why can't you strip the third party plugins, tools, and code from the source code and release the rest as open source?

Just leave notes indicating where the stripped plugin was and the general premise of what it did was and let the community do the rest....

All we are asking for is the chance...

Mhm

[idc]

Originally posted by Alexander DeLarge:

Let the community make something of it if you're not willing to keep hosting it.

This is a joke. You guys didn't even give the game a chance to live outside of early access. People stopped playing and were waiting for the end of early access because of the constant progression wipes. My whole group was going to play at launch and I'm sure we're not the only ones.

yup

[Nar'Gall]

Originally posted by Astra:

Nar'Gall, if there are no legal issues with the source code and assets, then it will be a community volunteers problem, isn't ?

No, it's not a community problem: we cannot make that available to third parties. Take for instance a Unity plugin that's paid in the Unity Store: we cannot redistribute that, nor hand over our copy to anyone. To strip it out we'll break the game to the point of it not being usable in cases, leaving the community with nowhere to begin.

To do it properly -- ie: remove, document, point, and make it work without it -- is a huge undertaking in its own right.

[Nar'Gall]

This is a joke. You guys didn't even give the game a chance to live outside of early access. People stopped playing and were waiting for the end of early access because of the constant progression wipes. My whole group was going to play at launch and I'm sure we're not the only ones.

The idea that everyone stopped playing until the game left Early Access is just as valid as the idea that the game failed because of PvP; or it failed because of PvE; or it failed because of the lack of NPCs; and so on. You get the idea: it's an opinion, not a fact.

The fact is that the game got to the stage it's at is due to all these issues combined. Pretending it was down to a single problem is simplifying a much more complex issue just for the sake of making it look like we just didn't want to fix it.

Worlds Adrift issues are many, and profound. We know what they are as the community told us what to improve, fix, change. But we cannot do it because we spend 90% of our time making it work, rather than making it better, thus it's a losing fight.

[RoReaver]

Originally posted by Nar'Gall:

No, it's not a community problem: we cannot make that available to third parties. Take for instance a Unity plugin that's paid in the Unity Store: we cannot redistribute that, nor hand over our copy to anyone. To strip it out we'll break the game to the point of it not being usable in cases, leaving the community with nowhere to begin.

To do it properly -- ie: remove, document, point, and make it work without it -- is a huge undertaking in its own right.

People are not cretins when it comes to fixing it and if things were done properly we wouldn't be discussing this but talking about the next step and dreaming of 1.0 so stop trying to excuse a poor choice.
Now do you guys have the benevolence of not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on your customer base and offering some fairly subpar games as recompense or will you keep justify not doing anything tangible by stating you'd need to do more than what people have requested? Again it doesn't have to be a functional piece of software, it could even be utterly worthless in terms of reusing it but giving it out will give people a model upon which to work off rather than guessing and it'll do more to wash the foul taste the shuttering has left than any sum of cash.
Oh and it might do a Hell of a lot to see Worlds Adrift reborn some years from now, it's not like people have salvaged dead games in the past. But this choice right now will set the tone for you guys as a whole between actual developers and toy makers (because I am bread is certainly a toy-tier game, Worlds Adrift has the potential to be a whole lot more).

[RoReaver]

Originally posted by Nar'Gall:

The idea that everyone stopped playing until the game left Early Access is just as valid as the idea that the game failed because of PvP; or it failed because of PvE; or it failed because of the lack of NPCs; and so on. You get the idea: it's an opinion, not a fact.

>people telling you they aren't playing due to wipes
>it's just your opinion man

I am also someone who was waiting for the wipes to stop and I have 3 friends who also were waiting for the same thing. Guess what chief: It ain't a opinion, it's fact.

[Noxeron]

So, not making this open so that others can host servers because "propietary" tech and all that basically just means you build this game as "service" from the ground up so that one day you can just shut it all down and ♥♥♥♥ everyone over... Like you are doing now.
Nice. Gonna avoid any other Bossa projects like the plague from now on. This should be illegal, and I hope some day it will be.
Good riddance.

[RoReaver]

Originally posted by Noxeron:

So, not making this open so that others can host servers because "propietary" tech and all that basically just means you build this game as "service" from the ground up so that one day you can just shut it all down and ♥♥♥♥ everyone over... Like you are doing now.
Nice. Gonna avoid any other Bossa projects like the plague from now on. This should be illegal, and I hope some day it will be.
Good riddance.

Technically in countries like Germany or the UK .... it is... far as I know consumer laws in those countries state failing to deliver a product as advertised is and unfortunately for Bossa
"Note: This Early Access game is not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development."
does not reasonably imply "Changes can include ending game development and rendering the game unplayable." under any interpretation you can care to name which means if anyone from those countries wanted to they could have a fair bit of fun in court.


The reason no one has done this yet is simple: A lawyer is expensive and getting a settlement where the offending party would cover legal fees is gonna take a long time.

[Crushed]

point 1 is funny. : In a nutshell :
"Others, wouldnt do better as us anyway with further development"

- ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!