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Therlun
Vanguard
Joined: 07 Aug 2004
Posts: 137
Location: Germany
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 Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2004 4:43 am Post subject: publisher and localisation |
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hii
another one of my daily threads... 
do you already have a publisher? i did not find any information on this.
i know Horizon is still some time away of release but this is an important topic dont you think?
i heared pretty much bad gossip about "strategy first" which published several non-hyped strategy games...
and as a related topic: do you have any plans to localize Horizon? how is the language implemented? if you dont plan a localisation how difficult will it be to translate the game on a fanmade basis? (is the gametext avaiable via textfiles, or is it ex- and importable?) |
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Zaimat
Dev. Team
Joined: 08 Aug 2003
Posts: 350
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:47 pm Post subject: |
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| do you already have a publisher? i did not find any information on this. |
I would expect we will make an announcement regarding publishing and distribution sometime after Horizon enters beta testing. But to answer your question we have not signed up with a publisher yet.
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| heared pretty much bad gossip about "strategy first" |
I had heard they had some financial trouble. Anything specific you heard?
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| any plans to localize Horizon? |
There is english and french support but we have plans to add more languages (german definately being next on the list). It would also be possible to mod it by players but the files are not in plain text format.
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Therlun
Vanguard
Joined: 07 Aug 2004
Posts: 137
Location: Germany
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| Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2004 4:19 am Post subject: |
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| Zaimat wrote: |
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| heared pretty much bad gossip about "strategy first" |
I had heard they had some financial trouble. Anything specific you heard?
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besides the usual untestified stuff i know that paradox stopped working with strategy first.
(paradox created the great Europa Universalis 1&2, the half-fantastic half-needing-improvement Victoria, the boring yet good selling Hearts of Iron, the even more boring Crusader Kings and is currently working on HoI2. meh, more boring ww2 stuff)
they stopped working with strategy first because SF completly mismanaged Victoria. too little advertising and many shops never were dilevered with, or even informed of, the game. 
on the other side SF was said to do an extremly good job in publishing EU and EU2 a few years ago (a few years before they mismanaged victoria that is)
rumors are paradox will publish Hoi2 themselfs...
strategy first now is also working with totalgaming.net, an online platform that offers download and online-support for a fee.
as far as i experienced it this is a system many fans liked and very few disliked (you can still buy the games in "normal" versions at stores if you arnt able or willing to use the online system so there is no reason to dislike it).
you buy a game from the creator, for a price the creator did set and then may download it. (40$ for galciv for example both for a download only, or a cd-version that is send to you)
or you pay 100$ per year for a total subscription and may download all games offered. until now the most important ones are Galciv, Disciples II: Ultimate Edition and ORB.
TG.net offers an easy to use online-interface-program. (which unwanted runs in the background all the time and has to be manually removed with regcleaner or something similar  damn spyware! )
there is an interesting (advertisment) article of one of the galciv creators here:
http://totalgaming.stardock.com/Articles.asp?MID=5&AID=21895
with the nasty quote:
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But no matter, we recovered. We clawed our way back up and made it into the Windows market. We decided to make a Windows version and we decided to work with a well known publisher on it (Strategy First). This time everything would go perfectly...
Well, that was a year and a half ago and we're still waiting for royalty payments on most of their sales. |
perhaps the article was written before strategy first joned tg.net ?  
despite this quote stardock did let SF publish galciv and its expansion pack.
| Zaimat wrote: |
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| any plans to localize Horizon? |
There is english and french support but we have plans to add more languages (german definately being next on the list). It would also be possible to mod it by players but the files are not in plain text format. |
now i quess as canadian developer french was not to far along the road.... |
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Zaimat
Dev. Team
Joined: 08 Aug 2003
Posts: 350
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Sat Jul 31, 2004 1:55 pm Post subject: |
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If I'm not mistaken Tg.net belongs to stardock. I know Brad Wardell has been talking about such a system for a couple of years.
But it's odd to see him make those comments about SF. Stardock is more than capable of suing them if they are witholding royalties. Perhaps they have made a deal instead where SF is adding their games on this new venture Stardock is trying.
Still from a developers point of view, it's very disconcerting hearing that even established publishers are not paying royalties in a timely manner.
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Horizon - Lead Designer |
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