FREE GAME: Free Stars

[Spalls Hurgenson]

Okay, this one is actually both more and less exciting than it sounds.

* Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2645580/Free_Stars_The_UrQuan_Masters/
Less, because a) this isn't a special offer that you gotta
run to take advantage of, and b) because the game was free
before; it just had another name. Essentially, this is just
"Star Control 2" (remember that classic?) with a new title,
forced upon it due to various legal issues. Still, the game is
still well regarded (despite its age) and it being free is
just icing on the cake.

So, free game and Star Control is back; that's cool. Grab it today, or
tomorrow, or whenever. But grab it. It's an excellent DOS-era game
with some nice modern QOL flourishes, and it wants to be in your
library.

[Mike S.]

On Tue, 20 Feb 2024 10:58:50 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:

>So, free game and Star Control is back; that's cool. Grab it today, or
>tomorrow, or whenever. But grab it. It's an excellent DOS-era game
>with some nice modern QOL flourishes, and it wants to be in your
>library.

Thank you Spalls. I remember really liking this one back in the day.

[Dimensional Traveler]

Mmmm, in the mood to minorly splurge so added it to my library.
Probably will never even install it let alone play it.

--
I've done good in this world. Now I'm tired and just want to be a cranky
dirty old man.

[Justisaur]

On 2/20/2024 7:58 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
>

Interesting to see it on Steam. If you go to the website linked from
steam it takes you to https://freestarsgame.com/

Which is apparently The Ur-Quan Masters 2 renamed.

It's been a long time since I played it, but at least the last couple
times I did it was The Ur-Quan Masters, not Star Control 2. One of my
favorite games of all time, so of course I added it to my Steam library.

It of course made me curious of the goings on of the two other 'forks'
so I looked them up:

Stardock seems to be continuing on with GalCiv mostly which is on IV.

And UQM was by the original Star Control makers, but now a part of
Pistolshrimp. But their other company Toys for Bob still seems to exist
as well. A confusing web of corporations of course.

--
Juffo-Wup fills in my fibers and I grow turgid. Violent action ensues! -
Mycon

-Justisaur

ø-ø
(\_/)\
`-'\ `--.___,
¶¬'\( ,_.-'
\\
^'

[kyonshi]

ok, here's some interesting stuff:
1. the Ur-Quan Masters (the game formerly known as Star Control II) has
been a freeware game for decades now, and from what I have seen is one
of those standard games downloads that have been ported to all kinds of
different Linux distributions. I remember installing the package uqm on
at least 5 different machines. (It also is a rather small package
nowadays. The website for this game has been https://sc2.sourceforge.net/

2. this particular game seems to be exactly the same, but with a
different title. it seems the game is free mostly as advertisement for a
sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters (that is Free Stars: Children of
Infinity). I do wonder how that works with all the copyrighted terms in
the game.

[Justisaur]

The original devs filed a DCMA against Stardock for it, Stardock sued
the original devs about it. It was settled. Basically each company got
to keep their fork and name and it can't be brought to suit again. From
the summary it seems a fairly amicable settlement. Here's a nice summary
if you want more details, which also has links to the full details.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/stardock-and-star-control-creators-settle-lawsuits-with-mead-and-honey/

UQM2 has been in production limbo as long as UQM has been around, so I
don't have much hope of seeing it come out before I or the devs die.

I enjoyed SC: Origins quite a bit, and feel it's a good addition to the
franchise. Sadly it was a huge financial flop. $10m in dev costs,
marketing is unknown, but typically double that. All I can find is 50k
in the first week, and at $29 that's about $1.5m. I can find current
numbers, but the max estimate I've seen is 300k, but could be far less,
and sales would eat into the total, max would be about $9m. That still
didn't pay for dev costs even if very high estimate were true. So we
aren't likely to see anything else Star Control from Stardock.

--