FreeCraft Cease and Desisted by Blizzard 808
mandreiana writes "As of June 20th, FreeCraft is shut down. The development team received a cease and desist order due to the name 'FreeCraft' causing possible confusion with the names StarCraft and WarCraft, and also some of the ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2. There will be no more updates to this game, and it is no longer available for download." Way to go, Blizzard, now the only competitors to worry about are the ones who can afford lawyers and actually hold competing market share. Of course, not using a *Craft for a game project might have kept it under the radar a while longer.
Give it a rest, Taco (Score:0, Interesting)
Sure, or perhaps those who don't violate a company's copyright. Funny the big double standards Slashdot has about this sort of thing, huh? I await a new GPL violation lynch story shortly.
name change? (Score:5, Interesting)
Blizzard doesn't hold the rights to the whole RTS genre, if that was the case then C&C and AoE and lots of others would be in trouble..
Um... (Score:1, Interesting)
Read Slashdot!! (Score:1, Interesting)
We will companies learn that eveything is not a threat?
just a little update! (Score:5, Interesting)
the advantage you have that Blizzard doesn't have is that you can move faster than they can, and you're not as tied down to a name/branding.
fly like a butterfly....
.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, why hasn't FreeCiv been sued out of existence then? Seems to me that there was some precedent to a game calling itself 'FreeSomething' and it being OK.
There was no chance of trademark confusion here.
If you dont plan to buy any other Blizzard game, (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps if you spent some of this money buying or donating to Freecraft not only would we have better games, we'd have free games. Free games would hurt Vivendi Universal and Blizzard more than anything else. Free Games that are good would kill them.
We need to set up a way to support development of games, perhaps a transgaming style game development company, where people subscribe, vote on the type of game they want and its features, and then the coders code it out.
They'd only have to charge 5$ a month, theres plenty of open source game engines to use, they'd only need to hire artists, and do some coding.
Open source game development means once one game is done they'd never need to reinvent the wheel, this means we could have higher quality Open Source games than the current game industry simply because everyone would use the best engine and improve on it instead of everyone writing or licensing their own.
Imagine what could be done? But we first need a way to fund enough games to get millions of people interested. The best way to make these greedy companies pay is to setup a whole open source PC game movement, on a large scale, and let the gamers fund it.
Transgaming is doing pretty good at version 3.1, they have allowed hundreds of games to be ported to Linux within a matter of years. Now I think its time for a company to step up and do a Linux game development setup, and not like what Loki did, but in a transgaming style payment setup.
It makes no sense for us to use the outdated old business model for open source products. Its proven that it doesnt work, the transgaming model is proven to work.
I'd subscribe to a FreeCraft subscription if there was a company out there willing to transfer my money, or if FreeCraft becomes a company and sets it all up. If they make a good game, I keep subscribed to them and if their game sucks I can subscribe to more established game development people who are better.
Re:This is bad, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Another project that frankly I'm surprised has made it this far is FreeVo - obviously a name in the same thought process as FreeCraft. I fully expected TiVo to crack down on them too.
I'm still unclear however. Was the main problem the name? It sounds like it, and if so, it was just a move to protect their trademark. If you don't defend your trademark (and those that may dilute your trademark) you lose it, so this Blizzard and their parent companies had to do this.
What isn't clear is why they didn't just change the name like Blizzard et al wanted and go on with life. Everyone is making it sound like Blizzard shut this project down, when it just looks like they wanted the name changed and the FreeCraft shut the project down all by themselves.
Sad. (Score:4, Interesting)
OTOH, I always thought it would have made more sense to build it as a generic engine, with at least one totally original theme, than a 100% clone of Warcraft mechanics. (In fairness, I think the plan was to move in that direction eventually).
But like a lot of these, probably 70% of the code was written by one guy, I think, so if they've chased him off the project is toast.
Victor's Secret (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'm wondering (Score:3, Interesting)
"Others steal toilet paper from their work place, others steal ideas from popular games. Toilet paper thiefs go to Hell [gamesdomain.com], idea thiefs to sales charts, especially if they are as good as Blizzard with Warcraft"
Obviously, the game before Warcraft was Dune II from Westwood.
Re:I dont hate Blizzard (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do I have the sneaky feeling that this code reuse on a large scale would also result in about 2000 games that are all pretty much the same, each being just a slightly different version of the same game, going by the personal vision of each lead developer?
Now I'm not saying that the current commercial model is at all successful in making original games (practically everything is either an FPS, an RTS, or a graphical mud - though there's the odd exception), but it seems to me that code reuse would only result in games that all look and feel the same.
Daniel
Re:Will You All Remember This? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'll be one of the first ones in line to buy their next game.
Next... FreeCiv? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"Plays Warcraft 2" (Score:5, Interesting)
Also this game adds a lot of features beyond WarCraft II. There are a few additions to the actual game, like the ability to pump out critters from farms, but they have also dropped the original warcraft II network system(that involved using ipx and then kali to emulate tcp/ip) and gone straight to tcp/ip. The game also allows more people for network play, from the original 8 to now 16 and the map size has gone from 256x256 up to a possible 2048x2048.
We tried for quite a while to get WarCraft II working on bootable dos cds so that we could run our operating systems of choice and then boot up a cd to play warcraft, but dos netcard drivers suck. This is the only way we could easily set up WarCraft II for network play, and yes we own many copys of WarCraft II and the expansions.
It's sad to see Blizzard attacking such a good program. I hope that the people behind freecraft just put their foot down, don't rename the damn thing and just keep doing what they do well and contribute more code to the project. If worse does come to worse though they could just rename the game and actually get some usable artwork. Either way, when Blizzard shutdown bnetd i said I would never buy another Blizzard product, and I haven't...now I'm to the point where I just want to take MY WarCraft II cd, make an iso, and put it up on kazaa or gnutella....which I think I'll go do.
Re:Shadowsource movement? Re: make them all martyr (Score:2, Interesting)
Well.
If companies, expecially media companies, aren't mature enough to understand that by driving people underground they are telling people not to come back on the surface again (Joe: "oooh: thankz to the undergroundz scene I can have all the divx movies that I want, why should I come back to the surface to buy a legitimate copy of Warcraft: The Movie?") let them be.
These action hurt us, I agree, but these actions hurt THEM as well.
Do you remember where the IT world was going before Linux come along? Unix was going to die and everyone was going to buy Windows on their servers, and former major players like Unisys were abandoning Unix. Thanks to Linux the Unix market got a lot of fresh techies who underlined the greatness of that platform on the whole.
If thanks Sco linux disappears underground, then Sco will get back to the distruction as it was happening years ago (Sco was going to die anyway, her inferior Unix was too inferior to compete with *BSD, let alone with other commercial unices). Yeah, and the IT world will be all Bill-centered.
The freecraft people being pissed off, is, on the whole, a group of people which will deny to enter the videogame market with their talent, mostly since they will not go and face an interview at a media company saying "Yeah, and we were banished to the underground by blizzard because our FreeCraft stomped on their IP". They would rather enter other jobs, maybe as cooks. Yes, people from Blizzard will not find talented programmers, people will not buy their videogames (they will rather warez them since they will be crappier than Commodore 64 games), but you know what will happen? They will find the best meals at the restaurant in front of their offices. More cooks, more competition, more quality in the restaurants.
This is not anymore 1990's where you could be asked to do the R-Type conversion for the Amiga, after being sent a C&D letter:
http://ign64.ign.com/articles/074/074185p1.html
Back then it wasn't easy to find talented people, but it wasn't so hard to fine-tune your skills by programming. If Blizzard/Vivendi wants to burn all the steps by pissing off programmers, let them be.
My point is: we can't do a lot alone for resolving the shitty situation of freecraft, yet we can do something for every oss developer: band together and make the oss scene prosper, even if we have to move underground.
Re:Bnet issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly.
A friend of mine works for Blizzard, and once got to see the rows of cabinets for B.Net-West. Between servers, network gear, and bandwidth, they have millions of dollars tied up in the system -- and it's all free of charge to those who have purchased their games. In addition, they still pay a fair amount of attention to older games, periodically releasing patches with some of them containing gameplay enhancements, as with the coming 1.10 patch for Diablo II.
Re:Way to go, make them all martyrs. (Score:3, Interesting)
CVS tarball (Score:1, Interesting)
If you do, please post it here, since that server isn't probably ready for a slashdotting, and the service might be closed if it's abused. That's also why I'm not providing a easy-to-download link above.
Host it out side USA? (Score:1, Interesting)
The 1000 year history of networked gaming ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Use chess as an inspiration
And "saving" a game and playing it back is cool too
Its all bullshit anyways (Score:3, Interesting)
Its all bullshit, there probably is no fucking letter. Any other project would have debated this and they would have posted the letter as well, i personally watched them just quit without discussion and fucking everyone else who was working on the project.
First FreeCraft, next... (Score:4, Interesting)
I know every time I see one of these these lumbering down the road I get confused and think maybe its a roving Blizzard expo, or promotional thing for the next installment of the tired ol' RTS genre.
I wish Blizzard et al would go after Starcraft RV too to protect me and all the other mindless drone comsumers from the risk of confusing two obviously different products with each other... what about Mastercraft [mastercraftboats.com] boats, Chris*Craft [chriscraftboats.com] boats, etc? Blizzard sure has a lot of work to do, I'm glad they are looking out for us easily confused consumers.
On a serious note, I think I'll stop buying Blizzard products all together. My entertainment dollars will go to a company with less intellectual property fascists on staff.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
I take it back -- mostly (Score:3, Interesting)
Oy, and to think: I almost mis-spelled hypocrisy too. :)
His post was not the definition of hypocrisy: it merely evinced it. He implied that he found fault with their actions, but then promised to buy their products anyway. I find the latter inconsistent with the former. Is that so controversial?
I think I see my error now. Looking back, all he really said was that he puts a higher priority on fun then on âoepoliticsâ. That didn't make any sense to me. I should have known from his characterization of this misdeed as politics, that he didn't really mind Blizzard's actions.
I stand corrected.