Has EA ever sold the rights to a game?

[baboom222222 0]

I am interested in contacting EA and buying the SimCity rights, I just want to know if this has happened before. Thanks,

Baboom222222

 

[CorinaMarie 29,922]

I can't say for certain, but as far as I know they have only ever licensed the resale of it to Gog or Steam or the port to Apple's OS.

[jaredh 195]

You'd need a LOT of money.  Like multiple million probably to just get them to listen.

[matias93 7,535]

Indeed, probably they would raise the price by only knowing there is somebody interested in paying for the rights

[Propfam 2,311]

It's better to get cooperate with us and buy the rights. We, as the community will have rights to make the next SimCity, far better than the (apocalyptic) SC13. SC4 could be better but EA doesn't give it big updates (or in current world, DLCs) so the community must explore the way to change it, starting from 2011 by the famous @simmaster07 and the progress remain stagnant until around 2015 with the release of SC4Fix, fixing the long-standing CTD when hovering TE lots with NAM puzzle pieces and allowing 3rd-party DLL to be loaded to the memory as long as the game run (yes, in old days, there are DLLs for SC4 but only when the game starts). Recently, he's updated the plugin to fix the (again) long-standing prop pox issue. In simple words, prop pox is a bug in the game that cities with prop file size above certain number will not show their props. But still, it's only the first step. Currently, we can't add new networks, add new menus etc with DLL. He might want to share his knowledge but it may be illegal so he don't want it on this forum.

Sorry for mistakes. Thanks.

[TekindusT 3,809]

As soon as they can keep milking the cow with the next iteration of SimCity Build-It In Your Tablet By Tapping A Lot And Paying If You Want To Have A Decent City, we can forget about that. SC4 keeps selling, they are very low numbers, but many of us who had problems after the Windows 10 update we had to buy it from a digital provider and sure EA wasn't exactly sad with that decision. Don't hold your breath that EA would give/sell the rights to the SimCity series in the next decades.

[T Wrecks 10,210]

^ Full ack.

• holding the rights doesn't cost them anything
• the franchise still makes low amounts of money for them
• selling the rights to an individual game wouldn't raise any substantial amount that an international multi-billion dollar business like EA would need in the first place
• separating the rights to one game from the other Sim[City] games may be tedious and create legal grey areas and uncertainties that EA can certainly do without
• selling the rights to anything SimCity may have a disastrous impact on EA's reputation because it might look like an emergency sellout such as the ones you may see by organisations who are in dire and desperate need of money - an image that EA would probably want to steer clear of
• the sale might be a startup help for competition - something that EA certainly doesn't need

In light of these points, I think a sale wouldn't make any sense in economic and business terms for EA, no matter how much we'd like to get our hands on that sweet SC4 source code.

[rsc204 21,868]

If you have access to the funds needed to even begin discussions, you'd be better off using them to hire a dev team to make a new game. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what a game is called, few of us here would care about the branding. If a game is good, it'll sell and find an audience, look at Cities Skylines. Without a ridiculous budget, it's made a tidy profit and been successfully. Of course we're talking 7-digit development costs in reality here.

[Spamoidutout 124]

16 minutes ago, rsc204 said:

If you have access to the funds needed to even begin discussions, you'd be better off using them to hire a dev team to make a new game. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what a game is called, few of us here would care about the branding. If a game is good, it'll sell and find an audience, look at Cities Skylines. Without a ridiculous budget, it's made a tidy profit and been successfully. Of course we're talking 7-digit development costs in reality here.

BTW I'm curious... do we really know how much Skylines cost to develop?

And about the SimCity rights... sadly this won't happen. As the others said they're still milking it... and they still might release a new one in a few years (who knows?).

[rsc204 21,868]

11 minutes ago, Spamoidutout said:

do we really know how much Skylines cost to develop?

It's doubtful you could ever get a specific figure from the developers, it being commercially sensitive and all. But I should think 1,000,000€ would be an absolute minimum to pay a small team to develop such a game over 18 months-2 years covering salaries and costs of the business.

Of course if you don't have office space with rents to consider, could reduce salary costs using self-employed contractors and other cost-reducing methods, you might do it for less. Certainly a community-based open source effort with some contracted paid works, would make it entirely possible to do for a much smaller sum.

[baboom222222 0]

Well thanks for all the help, I am still just plain curious if a games rights have ever being sold.

[Odainsaker 2,137]

One of my all-time favorite computer games was Starflight, which Electronic Arts published 1986 for DOS and which became a major stepping stone title of sandbox and sci-fi games.  That was three decades ago, when Electronic Arts itself was only four years old.  The game itself used two 5¼-inch floppy disks.  The DRM scheme was a cardboard code wheel that came in the box, which was surprisingly cool because when it was paired with the game's star map it felt like you were handling some sort of astrolabe for stellar cartography.  Developer Binary Systems, which Electronic Arts acquired in order to grab the game title, did not make any other games beyond that series and has long since ceased to actually exist as a real company, yet EA still tightly holds the rights.  For anyone that really wants to play a 30-year-old game originally written for DOS, you can still buy it on GOG.com.

As EA has not let go of that ancient property or its long obsolete code, we can be sure they will never part with anything related to Maxis, SimCity, or the Sims.

 

They are like the sinister Obsidian Order from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:  "Did you know that the Obsidian Order saves everything that comes into its possession?  You never know what might prove useful.  We have libraries of data transcripts, vaults of ancient artifacts, even...cryogenic chambers containing biological subjects like this one here."  Who knows what EA has forever secreted away in its buried caches.

 

[twalsh102 1,601]

14 hours ago, baboom222222 said:

Well thanks for all the help, I am still just plain curious if a games rights have ever being sold.

I seriously doubt that you will ever get any kind of definitive answer to that specific question.  If it has happened for any specific software title, it is probably not anything that the seller would turn into news headlines as it would negatively affect stock price.

A similar question with slightly different wording:  Have game software rights ever changed hands?  The answer is probably yes (if not certainly yes), but not as a result of a company voluntarily selling the rights.  This changing of hands would more likely be a result of a larger company making an offer to a smaller company, that the smaller company couldn't refuse.  And most likely the offer would be to "acquire" the smaller company in its entirety, rather than just a single piece of software.  No software company is going to sell the rights to anything that is making them money, especially when it isn't costing them a dime to continue to sell it.

While there wouldn't be any lasting harm in contacting EA, I would be prepared to be laughed at, if not literally, at least figuratively.  Every attempt made over the years by various people to just get the release of the source code for SC4 (probably on just about any terms EA games would choose to make) has been rebuffed by EA.  I can't see any circumstance whereby they would be willing to voluntarily sell the rights.  Of course, if you were to start any conversation with EA, with a statement that you were ready to cut a check right then for an amount that includes at least six zeroes in front of the decimal point, they might at least take pause to consider you might be serious.