Your idea has a crucial flaw Bob, it's illegal to make a profit from the SCP.
I never said make a profit from SCP. I said make a profit from the actual Freespace 2 distribution, including paying a commission to members of this community (SCP coders) to update the engine. If they want SCP--include a link to download it (again--free. If it must be paid for--bandwidth can be paid by any revenue generated).
Thus making a profit from it.
a. It's a pipe dream
b. It's illegal
c. Owning the IP doesn't give you the rights to the game engine.
Geeze--read the difference between the original Freespace IP and the new SCP additions. Anyways--owning the IP, at the very least, lets us distribute the game. Pipe dream or not--the day is still coming and someones going to do something eventually. As for owning the engine--it's already open source but licensed to be distributed for profit (AKA revenue).
One last time:
1) Buy the Freespace IP for $xx,xxx
2) Sell copies of Freespace, Silent Threat, and Freespace 2 to make back at least a large portion of the $xx,xxx spent
3) If viable legally, pay known programmers (preferably from the SCP project, but the newly updated code not "open source") to update the engine to support popular Operating Systems
4) If viable financially, access Volition's willingness to release or purchase anything else Freespace related (such as an expansion pack, all original materials, or possibly another game, be it Freespace 3 or otherwise)
It's not liscenced to be distributed for profit, it's open source ONLY UNDER the provision that it NOT be used for profit.
1) You can't, it's not just $xx,xxx, try $xxx,xxx,xxx. Plus, Interplay probably won't part with it, and if they do, they'll probably put all sorts of stipulations on it, like you have to develop a game within X amount of time (like Fallout).
2) You can't, no one wants to buy a 7-8 year old game. You're a fanboy, we're all fanboys, of course we're going to want to buy it, but I don't know if you've been living under a rock for the past 10 years or so, so let me spell it out for you;
no one wants to buy space games these days. EVE online, arguably the most successful one out there, isn't even a space game, it's an MMO, and that only has about 130,000 people playing.
3) Good luck with that.
4) Hah, yea right. Most of the original [V] staff is gone, and the ones that are still around are controlled by THQ.
You really have a massive lack of understanding of the industry as a hole, and just how old FS2 is, not to mention how old that this style of gaming is. Case in point; the interface. We can navigate it easily, we think it's really easy to use. One of the biggest problems with the BTRL release was people not getting how to use an interface that was designed for a more tech-savvy generation of gamers who weren't used to console interfaces.
