https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/marvel-heroes-rebirth-action-rpg#/
I wasn’t sure if this was serious or trolling (to revive the Marvel Heroes Online MMO-ARPG which was suddenly shuttered in November 2017) because the first thing I looked at was the goal ($450K) and then the objectives of this campaign.
In short, this is not going to get far. It is yet unclear which specific assets of Gazillion Entertainment will be put up on the auctioning block in its bankruptcy proceedings. And even if the codebase for Marvel’s Heroes is on the block, it is also encumbered with intellectual property which Gazillion only licensed. Furthermore, that code will also be worth far north of the total funding goal for this campaign (which parts of is also slated to be used to setup ElderMage Studios). And even if they were to come up with that money, they would have funding issues with the licensing the hero characters from Marvel Entertainment.
If anything, Marvel Entertainment (which is owned by Disney) would be able to pickup up the codebase on the “cheap” (from Disney’s perspective) as compared to the principals in this fundraising campaign.
Finally, there is absolutely no way that this Paragon Institute will be able to outright acquire the intellectual property rights for the hero characters in the Marvel universe period unless they ante up a lot more money. Without the rights, all of that encumbered IP would need to be stripped out from the server side code. All visual assets would also have to be stripped out from the game client and ElderMage Studio would be left with producing their own graphical assets (something which does not come cheap for quality work).
As far as the DMCA exemption that the U.S. Copyright Office is currently deliberating (which I wrote about before), that would need to first be approved, and then there is going to be a long road in terms of the actual process. How that would also work is going to be subject to debate; like how retroactive would it be? That exemption furthermore does not allow one to make changes to the game nor does it allow for it to be profited from. It’s main premise is for preservation purposes and to allow such preservationists to create private server versions without being subject to the DMCA.
This reminded me of the time my friend and former colleague, floating the idea of myself and him acquiring the rights to Devilian in order to turn the screws on Trion (he absolute hates specific people there). Well to be frank, he did consistently get under their skins by throwing out tidbits (on their forums) of some of the stuff we knew from one of his carefully placed industry sources in Korea. He enjoyed taking underhanded potshots at Trion’s former project manager for Devilian (who was also responsible for managing the business side operations of both ArcheAge and Devilian), Victoria “Firecait” Voss. Myself, I tried to be more diplomatic even though I despised most of the same folks as him.
Digressing, that was one of the few times I had to “slap” him silly because it goes beyond just the price tag of that IP (which is also heavily reliant on IP from its big brother, TERA). If you even are able to come up with an amount that would satisfy Bluehole, there would also need to be some sort of business plan to further develop the title, publish it, support it, and be able to recoup those costs. There is no way I want to go into the business of developing and publishing MMO’s.
To put it more bluntly, this IndieGoGo is a IndieNoGo as far as I am concerned.
UPDATE: According to further digging by MMOBomb, it seems this Paragon Institute is associated with a diploma mill.
