Re: OT: Bad B5 Sim news.

[various people's responses]
>> > Oh man!  I was eagerly waiting for this!  Fooy!  Cowards!
>> 
>>	Well, Sierra's excuse is that the B5 game wouldn't have been
>> profitable.	They claimed that they sunk so much money into the
project
>> that they never would have gotten a return on the investment.
>
>highly illogical. if they cancel it, they make 0 profit. if it was 99%
>complete, they would maximise profit by finishing it and shipping it,
>unless the sales revenue would have been less than 1% of development
>costs, which strikes me as unlikely. i would guess that it was actually
>far from finished. someone (mr Wikan?) mentioned problems with the
engine
>and the team building it, which sounds quite serious.

For what it's worth, I got the below msg from the list jms posts to.
JMS'
response follows the initial poster's note.

Mk
------

Subj:	B5: Into the Fire Cancelled
From: WWS <wschmidt@tyler.net>
Date: 21 Sep 1999 15:01:27 -0600
Lines: 24

More bad news, as if any more was needed.  Someone should get flagged
for piling on.	This just showed up on rastb5, haven't seen it here yet.
 
This is really disappointing, as I was really looking foward to this
one.
I guess the rumours about the game being in trouble last February were
true.

(reposted from rastb5)

James Ell wrote:
> 
> Sierra/Havas has decided to cancel the upcoming Babylon 5 based space
combat
> game, Babylon 5: Into the Fire and fired the entire development team:
> http://www.avault.com/news/displaynews.asp?story=9211999-13445
> 
> If you're as angry as most of us are over at the Sierra Studios
Babylon5
> Forums, get over here and lets get a petition going to save the game.
> http://ftp.sierrastudios.com/ubb/Forum17/HTML/001289.html
> 
> - James

-- 

__________________________________________________WWS_____________

From: jmsatb5@aol.com (Jms at B5)
Date: 21 Sep 1999 17:40:05 -0600
Lines: 29

Yeah, I got word of this today from one of the developers on the game;
apparently the problem is two-fold: 1) because Sierra has taken so long
to get
the game out, it has become expensive, and the additional million bucks
used to
relocate the facility north (and everyone involved) was charged against
the
game, and 2) they made a deal with WB for X number of games in Y years,
and
they've chewed up most of that time already, and WB is (I'm told,
haven't had a
chance to verify this yet) loathe to renegotiate since it's now taken
--what?--
three, four years to get this first game out.  

There's rumors that another studio might be interested in picking it up
and
finishing it off -- it was literally inches from being finished, and
it's a
spectacular game -- but again that's only rumor, I don't know anything
beyond
that.

(The game would have allowed players to go through all of the major wars
of the
B5 universe -- the Dilgar War, the Earth/Minbari War, the Shadow War and
the
Earth Civil War -- with a chance of affecting the outcomes and dealing
with the
temporal stresses caused by that.)

 jms

(jmsatb5@aol.com)
B5 Official Fan Club at:
http://www.thestation.com