ZylonBane on 19/6/2008 at 17:27
Quote Posted by eagle17
Quite the contrary, I do know what walkthrough is and I'm merely implying that releasing a walkthrough for this "game" is an insult.
From the walkthrough--
Quote:
Limbo of the Lost
by Majestic Studios
Hints by Inferno & Walkthrough by MaGtRo
December 2007
This walkthrough was written by some fans of the game, and released long before the current controversy. So your outrage is more than a little irrational.
Springheel on 19/6/2008 at 18:10
Quote:
And I can´t imagine serious publishers looking at thousands of fonts, artworks, midi files, textures and models to find any problem. They´re not the police, they just want to see a sellable product and pack it for money.
Unless the publishers 1) did not play the game themselves, OR watch the videos, or 2) do not play video games themselves (and didn't have anyone else who plays video games playtest it), I can't accept that they couldn't tell.
I don't play very many games (never played Oblivion, actually), and yet I could pick out rip-offs from the few games I have played with almost zero effort.
If publishers are indeed that stupid, why aren't more people scamming them for some quick and illegal profit? "Hey, here's a great stealth game I made...I call it, uh, "Guy Who Steals". Please sell it for me and send my profits to P.O. Box 39994."
Springheel on 19/6/2008 at 18:23
This is probably worth spreading around:
Quote:
Hi all,
I'm Marko Hautamäki and I composed the music for LotL game level backgrounds and most DVD features, and my music also appeared in several trailer videos that can be found in YouTube.
I am preparing a press statement about my involvement in the game development and this is also why I registered to this forum. This is very bad publicity for me as a composer. Thus I'm trying to do everything I can to clear my own name.
There have been speculations that the game contains stolen music. Majestic Studios project leader Steve Bovis assured me this is not the case and I can 100% guarantee the material I was personally involved in. I have the original project files of every music piece I made for the game to prove this.
I will post the press release here as well.
Meanwhile, I will try to check this forum every now and then. If you have any questions I'll try to answer them but please bear in mind that a) I'm bound by NDA, and b) apart from music I have practically no information on the game creation process. I got involved in the project in May 2006 and finished my part in December 2006.
If anyone has actually found stolen music in the game, I would very much like to know about it!
Sincerely,
Marko Hautamäki
Zillameth on 19/6/2008 at 18:24
Quote Posted by Springheel
If publishers are indeed that stupid, why aren't more people scamming them for some quick and illegal profit? "Hey, here's a great stealth game I made...I call it, uh, "Guy Who Steals". Please sell it for me and send my profits to P.O. Box 39994."
Publishers are business people who spend their time dealing with business strategies, marketing campaigns, target groups and other things like these. And we're talking about a minor publisher. Probably a small company that doesn't really have money for extensive prerelease testing. I can believe they didn't notice.
The reason why there aren't more cases like this one is that even if publisher doesn't notice, the general public does. So in the long term it's not a feasible scam.
WhiteFantom on 19/6/2008 at 18:49
Quote Posted by Zillameth
Publishers are business people who spend their time dealing with business strategies, marketing campaigns, target groups and other things like these.
But in order to
develop those business strategies and marketing campaigns and in order to know what groups to target, the publisher absolutely has to have a decent grasp of the gaming industry; to say otherwise would be akin to a manufacturer of women's shoes having no knowledge of the fashion industry. If you run a business, you have to know your market.
--Jennifer
Zillameth on 19/6/2008 at 18:59
The problem is, business people operate on aggregated data. For instance, marketing data they use is not a list of shoe photographs with annotations like "young women like this one", "old men like this one", "children like this one" and so on. It's a list of abstract trends like "during next season blue shoes on high heels are most likely to turn a good profit".
In terms of games it's like saying a profitable game should be a 3rd person shooter with an explicit cover system and high polycount, instead of actually playing Gears of War and saying "kids dig this".
Gambit on 19/6/2008 at 19:26
Quote:
In terms of games it's like saying a profitable game should be a 3rd person shooter with an explicit cover system and high polycount, instead of actually playing Gears of War
Exactly.
They know the industry by seeing trends. Their job is not sitting down and playing games all day but knowing what is going to sell or not.
These publishers obviously knew Oblivion, but as a "popular open ended 1st person RPG with dynamic battles and high fantasy setting". Knowing this and knowing how one of Oblivion´s castle hall looked like is very different.
Of course, they could pay for playtest or an editor/revisor but they were really low on budget.
Maddermadcat on 19/6/2008 at 20:47
Just wondering, did they steal the main character from somewhere too? Considering the fact that they stole that much content, I have trouble believing that any part of the game but the writing is their own work.
Digital Nightfall on 19/6/2008 at 21:54
Yes. I believe most (many?) of the characters (the main one included) are actually (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poser) poser models.
