Why cant you sell astroids anymore?

[DBZ-GOKU-]

i played astroids on my frinds palm that he siad he baught a while back and i thought it was really cool. but, when i went to the exact html site that it said when you opned the game, it siad that you could no longer sell it, Why?

[Hiroshi]

Yes, I love the Astroids too. It is simple but very exciting game. (It will be stay on my palm forever). I know the reason for why it stop the sales.
However, I hope sale start again if astraware can it.

[DBZ-GOKU-]

can you tell me why i astraware cannot sell it anymore?

[Howard]

OK - put simply :)

A few years back, when this was just a hobby David and I did in occasional evenings, I wrote Astroids while learning C and Palm OS programming.
We put it on sale, and it did reasonably well, although in comparison to any of our games on sale now, it wasn\'t many copies.

When we wrote Zap! and Zap!2000, and the sales of that were good, we realised that it could be more than just a hobby. We changed Astraware from a partnership to a company in terms of its business structure.
Around the time of the switchover, we were contacted by Hasbro. (Hasbro is a large board games company, but had bought Activision - the previous owners of Atari, who had created Asteroids).
They told us to \'cease and desist\' distribution and sales of the game.

They are the owners of the trademarked title of the Asteroids game, and we were in the wrong by using it. We removed the game immediately from our website, PalmGear and Handango, and all other websites that were carrying the program and who would respond to email. Astroids vanished basically overnight, but like anything on the internet, it still gets passed around, and there are still a few niche sites that carry a download for it, and who ignore my emails!

Our decision at that time was that removing Asteroids, and going completely legitimate in all of our company endeavours was the right thing to do. This has stood us well, because we have since had the opportunity to do a lot of licensed games. Plus, its right that if we are using someone elses intellectual property, be it a name or a concept, then it is right to pay them an appropriate license fee. I would expect the same back for someone to license any of my original work!

At the same time that we removed Astroids, we also removed Fire!, which while we had had no contact from the owners (Nintendo) we knew that it was a good idea to carry only licensed or original software. (As it happens, Nintendo did take notice of some other Palm software quite a while afterwards)

Hasbro in fact cracked down on a lot of other software at the time - pacman and missile command clones, etc, however since these are mostly written by hobbyists, they have little to fear, and so most of these are still available on PalmGear etc. We\'re not in the same position, in that it would be damaging both in terms of litigation, and to our good reputation to make or sell unlicensed clones of games. I think all people serious about writing Palm games are of the same view.

Infogrammes, a large French games company, bought out Hasbro last year. I\'ve been in contact with them regarding licensing the titles, but its a long slow process. I don\'t expect to see movement anytime soon, but if there is any news, you can be sure I\'ll be letting everyone know!

OK - there\'s pretty much the whole story! Questions ?

Howard

[jerryc98]

Any chance of you updating Asteroids so it will run in my NR70/V and making the update for registered users only? I HOPE that you DO that:) I REALLY MISS PLAYING Asteroids:(:(:(:(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am thinking of getting a old IIIc gust so I can play Asteroids:)!!!!

[jael]

Our decision at that time was that removing Asteroids, and going completely legitimate in all of our company endeavours was the right thing to do. This has stood us well, because we have since had the opportunity to do a lot of licensed games. Plus, its right that if we are using someone elses intellectual property, be it a name or a concept, then it is right to pay them an appropriate license fee. I would expect the same back for someone to license any of my original work!

I like you guys. You do good work, you\'re ethical and you\'re responsive.

[DBZ-GOKU-]

thank you for the explanation had, and i agree with jael. but a gmea that i have just played resently, ancient red, (www.ancientred.com or www.syrell.com) is a very cool rpg with awsome graphics and has the basic idea of my favorite rpg, NOX. i think that you should make a proposal or something like that to westood studios(a part of electronic arts) and make a palm version of the game, and make the graphics like on the games, ancient red. i think that this would be the biggest and baddest RPG on the market if you could sell this. an example would be, ancient red has four stars, because it does not relaly have a good story line and good game play. but, if you made Nox, and made some sort of cool thing with the keys and stylus (keys for specials, and stylis for moving), it would have a five star rating, because of awsome game play and awsome graphics, and awsome story line. pelase tell me what you think had, and please, everyone els tell me what you think.

[Pritch]

Howard, I am proud of your ethics, removing the game from whatever sources would respond to you :)

Having read this thread, I thought that I should check back through my old registrations and found that my Palm Game Pack registration from March 2000 does indeed not include Fire or Astroids within the link, but the game pack update link 1.3 still contains the two games!

Maybe you should check this out - if you need the link to help you find it, let me know and I can Email it to you, otherwise, if you prefer I could post it here...

...and see who gets there first!! ;) ;)

(P.S. You were quite generous back then - the game would run 40 times without the shareware reminder ;) )

[Howard]

Eeek....

We did put together lots of packs of various versions, and so when we removed the main game downloads and pages, we still left the downloads for a short time so that anyone who had just purchased would still be able to get it.
The intention was that we would remove it once the traffic had dropped. Looks like we forgot about some of the links (doh!). I\'ve moved it now :) Thanks for spotting!

Back then we were still trying different methods to find out what worked best. I think 40 games was rather generous ;)
Nowadays we\'re normally looking at 10 free games, and then an increasing nag. For some games we\'ve tried having a hard time-out built in as well (say, after 20 games). The current version of Text Twist available does this. It has made *no* significant effect on sales, either way. (I was quite surprised!)

*sigh* - I\'d love to go back to Astroids and reimplement it with our new trendy libraries. The frame rate would be sweet.... I\'ll have to get in touch with Infogrammes again ;)

Howard.

[Pritch]

*sigh* - I\'d love to go back to Astroids and reimplement it with our new trendy libraries. The frame rate would be sweet.... I\'ll have to get in touch with Infogrammes again ;)Yes, with version 1.63c, the game still runs nicely on my m505 - showing just how good the game was, being nearly 2 years old now.

A bit more speed would make it a really great update! (I can understand why Hiroshi still has it on his Palm) - unlucky those of you who didn\'t get it when the chance was there!! ;)

[DBZ-GOKU-]

yes, i finally found a color copy of asteroids, my friend beamde dit to me from his visor prism. oh, and i agree with pritcgh, i think it should go a little faster.

[hfritz]

I found a copy of Astroids on my harddisk :P. On my new palm m515 it makes a lot more fun than on my old greyscale palm :). I also discovered a version of Astraware Fire, which is also not distributed any more :). Nice to have a look on these \"older\" palm games. (and best: my GamesPack 2001 reg. code works with both games ;)).

Holger

[Hiroshi]

I can understand why Hiroshi still has it on his Palm
Oops, Finaly, You understand it.:P You maybe find my name in enclosed html document.:P
P.S.
I\'m a regular user of the Astroids.:P Oh, Its only $5 at the time.

[DBZ-GOKU-]

oh, hey hfritz, i have fire also, but i have had that for a while. i think i got it six months ago at palm.com. i love the color on my m505, and i am thinking about getting a m515, or maybe even a compaq ppc. but then i wont be able to play asteroids on the ppc, or fire. what should i get?