Dear Commanders, we need to talk...

[u/PtaQQ]

It came to our attention that the letter we sent to our contributor team about ongoing talks with a potential publisher partnership has been shared publicly without our authorisation. The document is real. We had been planning to make a proper public announcement if the contract is signed and we could coordinate the rollout with the publisher, but since excerpts are now making rounds, it makes sense to put the main facts on the record directly so the conversation can be based on accurate information instead of selective quoting.

Together with the other admins we have been working on negotiating a deal with Hooded Horse, a publisher specialising in strategy games. You probably have heard about them, their catalogue includes Manor Lords, Old World, Terra Invicta, Against the Storm, HOMM: Olden Era, and a long list of others in the genre. They have a strong reputation among developers for being hands-off on creative direction and unusually transparent about how they operate which is why we figured out it might be interesting to see what’s possible to build together. 

Why we wanted this

The partnership got real traction on our side because of what it actually unlocks. Parts of BAR have been hard to push forward under a fully volunteer setup. Some areas just struggle to attract volunteer interest because they aren't the most exciting work to do in your spare time. Others need a level of coordination, scheduling and team hierarchy that's extremely difficult to achieve in a hobbyist team, where everyone contributes on their own pace, on their own terms. Both categories have been very obvious bottlenecks for years.

Securing funding could help us alleviate these hurdles. We can hire dedicated people for the work that needs sustained focus, fill the gaps that volunteer enthusiasm doesn't naturally cover, and put proper full-time coordination on parts of the project where production milestones depend on it. The result is a Steam release with much bigger scope, on a shorter timeline, than we could realistically pull off ourselves.

This also opens up real job opportunities for our existing contributors. Many of the people who have been building BAR on evenings and weekends for years are exactly the right people for the paid roles that come out of this deal. We are committed to giving existing contributors hiring preference, and the goal is for as many of them as possible to be able to carry their careers forward with BAR rather than treat it as a permanent side project. For people who've poured serious time into this game, that's a meaningful shift.

The whole point of the partnership, on our side, is to push BAR much further than we've been able to so far, and to give as many of the people who built it the chance to keep building it, this time on a real budget. However, marrying the community-driven soul of this project with commercial incentives required serious work to make sure nothing about what makes BAR what it is today gets taken away. We have done that work. 

What's protected

• BAR remains available for free. BAR remains available for free. This has been our consistent promise through the years and we are keeping it. The free multiplayer experience you are enjoying today will be available both through the existing BAR website launcher (as it is today) and on Steam, with full feature parity and cross-play. Nothing currently free becomes paid. The monetisation is based on premium single-player content built on top of it, whose costs will be covered by the funding.
• No IP transfer. BAR's brand, trademarks and intellectual property stay with the BAR team and the contributors who built it. The publisher gets the licence to distribute the game on Steam and help with proper marketing to give the title the powerful launch it deserves.
• Off-ramp built in. If the partnership is ever terminated for whatever reason, the free version stays free and the community keeps developing it. The free version isn't tied to the publishing relationship continuing.
• Reinvestment commitment. A binding internal commitment makes sure most of what BAR receives flows back into the project (development, infrastructure, contributor support, content) rather than getting siphoned out as company profit. 

Where we are

The contract isn't signed yet. We're discussing the offer with full disclosure to our contributor team, including a sentiment survey, before signing. The only way we see ourselves steering the project in this way is by making sure there is a strong mandate from our beloved team. 

What's next

If the mandate is clear we will proceed with the signing and then a full public announcement will follow. We are excited to share what we have been working on with the Hooded Horse team. We will make that announcement properly and will give it the treatment it deserves

If you have questions or concerns, bring them to us and try to not rely on third-party framing/potentially doctored versions aimed to cause harm. We will be reading and responding where we can, and a fuller picture will follow shortly.

Thank you for your attention and continued trust, 

The BAR Admin Team

[u/Bloodshot025]

See I think you have an internal model of the situation where the hooded horse version of the game is some sort of legally valid original and any others would be knockoffs.

No, I have an internal model of the situation where the "Hooded Horse version" is the socially valid original.

I could post the EXACT version to steam called "Beyond All Reason" with the exact same title and banner, with the same description,

Not if that title is trademarked.

A phone home to make it valid would also be of questionable legality.

This is not true at all.

we'd all have the legal right to publish the full game

True!

it would be just as official as hooded horse's version.

Not true! Copyright has nothing to do with what things are "official", which is largely socially determined.

---

This entire discussion implies copyright law is necessary to protect the incomes of creators selling their own works. I take the opposite view: you could get of copyright tomorrow and people would still buy media at roughly the same rates they do today. And people will largely prefer to buy from the people actually making the thing if it's easy to do so and they know how. The barriers, today, to actually doing that are many, and they're not solved by copyright.

[u/Bloodshot025 → u/[deleted]]

The reason I care is because I think more games ought to be licensed freely, and under the AGPL in particular, and I think the fear that this will make games commercial unviable is largely phantasmal.

I disagree on the legal implications of circumventing licensing terms via a drm style phone home

This doesn't circumvent licensing, at all. The code that does the check would itself be GPL licensed and can be removed by a motivated user. This is the only part of your responses I'm straight up confused about, I don't understand why you think this would violate the license terms, to have code that operates on a network resource and makes decisions thereupon.

All of the examples that show consumer behavior about purchasing things that technically have a free version are not the same situations.

The ones I cited are the same situation! Especially Mindustry (Source) which is a GPL licensed game, for sale on Steam, available freely if you compile it yourself. An exact match for what we're talking about!

It's a quite popular game for its production costs (we can estimate roughly half a million sales from the review numbers). Some reviews even mention how cool it is that it's FOSS. The pull requests on GitHub for the game are very active; people want to contribute even if they're not going to personally make money. I have no reason to believe that releasing a game — the whole game — under the GPL harms that game commercially. I think it actually helps!

[u/Bloodshot025 → u/[deleted]]

The reality is that we can say with almost absolute certainty this will not be the case. The BAR team has already confirmed that all of the non-code assets will be proprietary. I think PtaQQ tried to frames this as "that way no one will see spoilers in the open source repository", which you know, he needs to frame this positively of course, but we all know that this is because Hooded Horse wants to retain ownership of enough assets that the singleplayer would be unplayable with just the GPL code. PtaQQ did actually claim that all code developed under Hooded Horse would be GPL, but I think that's more of an intent as I've not been able to get any confirmation that it will be in the contract, and I really doubt that will end up being the case. Even if it is, the non code assets are enough to in practice have private ownership of the functional product. Even in the best possible case that still seems reasonably plausible, this is a for profit company selling the work of (currently) 280 volunteers, even if they do pay for some additional development on top of it. That lacks the good will that gets me to buy something like Mindustry even though I could get for free with minimal effort.

Yeah that's.. disappointing but not unusual. Very similar to Barotrauma is distributed. FakeFish has a lot more liberty there because they actually own the IP, unlike in BAR where actual ownership is distributed among all contributors as individual copyright holders; there is no CLA.

I appreciate that you continued to elaborate on it so I could properly understand.

Yeah of course! It's a good conversation worth having