[bochen777]

My proposed solution for the future of Titanic HG -- Open Letter to Tom and crew

https://www.titanichg.com/

https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ti ... -t-1378063

https://pastebin.com/KqQwdJ1r

For the TLDR skip to the bottom...

So I'll get to the point... Tom and crew have been looking for outside investors and said "investors" have been "just around the corner" for the past five years or more by now... and post-COVID, I'm sorry to say, that its just not going to happen, at least not in the way they imagined it... No one is going to be giving them millions of dollars to finish making this project/game as Tom invisions it to be, period. full stop.

No financial investor, angel investor, venture captialists etc is ever going to invest in this project, its just too risky and would most likely end up with negative return on investment or entire loss of principle invested... lets face it, the money guys aren't dumb people, they go where there is best rate of return and if TitanicHG as a project was financially appealing they would have found an investor by now... if this project was very appealing from a monetary return on investment standpoint, they would have investors chasing them, not the other way around...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs9w5bgtJC8


In terms of AAA title games, there is not really a market for mainstream Titanic game, at best it would be a small niche. For the sake of arguement lets say I'm wrong and some large gaming dev/publisher felt they wanted to give Titanic a chance, and they wanted to make a Titanic game for PC and consoles... Its almost certain that they would have a storyline surrounding that, and they would already have their own plot, characters, stories etc and would never hand over creative aspect to Tom's TitanicHG... any large respectable studio could afford to hire their own team of dedicated modelers, animators, script writers, game developers etc etc and wouldn't need to collaborate with TitanicHG/ Tom/FourFunnels/etc... They would be much better starting from scratch using latest and greatest tools, technologies, design methods, etc rather than say attempting to license the existing (but unfinished) TitanicHG static model from the TitanicHG team, since this project is going on better part of almost a decade now and its already aging and showing such age... When this TitanicHG was first ported over from Crysis mod to Unreal, the then state of the art graphics card was a GTX 600 series, today we have the RTX3090 coming out, a 50 fold improvement in terms of raw performance. We are now in the age of 8k gaming, Real time ray tracing RTX, volumetric particle effects and everything else, and infinite polygons/virtual memory management with the debut of Unreal Engine 5 and its technological breakthroughs... There is nothing proprietary about the Titanic itself, and the THG team obviously does not hold any patents, copyright, to "The Titanic" itself, so any major AAA gaming group that wanted to make a Titanic game would never considering going with THG (and thus handing over creative control) or even licensing what is an incomplete Titanic model that has now aged by more than half a decade.... Just ask Microsoft if they still want to license Outerra for their next Flight Simulator lol

Okay, so what about small time indie game publishers and small game development groups that want to do a Titanic sort of game? If they partner up with THG team, odds are knowing Tom, he wouldn't settle for anything less than absolute creative control and basically hijacking any sort of collaboration and taking over the entire project... Most indie devs teams wouldn't be amenable to that sort of style and besides, at that point they really just become an investor rather than a true collaboration... that only leaves the window open for licensing the static model itself... Forget the fact that the TitanicHG static model is nowhere near 100% completed, and lets pretend for now that it wasn't already more than 7 years old and aging rapidly, the fact of the matter is, any indie team that wished to do a Titanic game would only marginally benefit from licensing the TitanicHG model, since as we all know, modeling the ship itself is the easiest part of any Titanic game, its the everything else, the characters, the animations, the physics, the storyline and other gameplay mechanics etc that is the hardest part... so if they blow their budget by licensing TitanicHG model, they would still have to finish the rest of it themselves and update it to Unreal 5 when it comes out next year, and then they are back at square one, the exact spot that the TitanicHG indie team is at, which is a model but nothing else and still needing to complete everything else but now they are out whatever money they spent on licensing the model from Tom and what are they gonna do? A kickstarter or indiegogo to get more funds when the niche market is already saturated and anyone interested in any Titanic sim/game have already pitched into the TitanicHG crowdfunded from yesteryear so there goes that out the window.... so no, the prospects of any indie game dev interested in making a Titanic game partnering up with THG team is small to none, and licensing the model from THG only makes sense if its economica
lly feasible (if they can agree on price/cost of license) but knowing Tom and knowing the history of the THG group, they would never agree to a reasonable price on model licensing and would feel that if they let that out the door then they have nothing left (which is sadly true)

There was a critical point of inflection at which they should have strike while the iron was hot, so to speak. They lost their chance to release the game when interest was high when the sinking simulation went viral. But I recall Tom posted a teaser image of the C desk grand stair case fill up with water alongside a video of some sort of the real-time sinking in the dining room area or something and mentioned specifically if would release that sinking sim to the world/backers if they could get another $65000~ or thereabouts extra donations within the 24 hour period in which their third /or final crowdsourcing fundraiser campaign came to a close... In term of peak community interest I also feel this was one of the maximums.... back then no one complained about the unrealistic water since that was pretty much industry standard... Now we have Unreal 5 coming out, RTX3080 next week, and its all about 4k/8k gaming, real time ray tracing, volumetric this and that... and in this new generation/new decade, their water is simply not even passable anymore not to mention in their Britannic steam release plenty of people pointed out the unrealistic/fake looking flag at the end of the ship... when they could have spent $15 and gotten a great off the shelf flag plugin for UE4.... No excuse really... But back to the point, that is when during this period they should have seized the moment and back then and there came out with the Titanic for Steam on Early Access, priced it at $29.99 and would have had much better chance and comparatively been in much better position overall today than they are now... I think its part greed/avarice, part wanting to bite off more than they can possibly chew and part exceptionalistic perfectionalistic (thinking they and only they are perfect and no one else can match and they ever do it their way or not at all etc) that have pitted them into this rock and hard place they are in today.... simply said, their ideals some of which unreasonably lofty, have lead them astray from what the markets and realities will bears...

One of the best water plugins for UE4 (same engine TitanicHG uses) that used to charge hundreds has now been released for FREE, and you have to ask yourself why. I think it is because technology has caught up, and with the debut of Unreal Engine 5, water will be much more realistic right out of the box, the world of gaming is moving forward, and the THG team isn't merely standing still, they are sliding backwards and regressing at faster and faster rate.. https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplac ... ter-system

Red Dead Redemption has the advantage of being produced by a known AAA studio, as does God of War. Not to mention huge amounts of money thrown at development and VERY broad hype among the gaming community for practically every release. Titanic:HG doesn't have any of that. No AAA dev status, no huge amounts of money, and no broad-scale hype. I would be willing to say that there isn't even broad scale awareness about the game in the gaming community. It sucks to say it, but people just don't care enough. Even among the Titanic enthusiasts (which are probably a fairly small number anyhow) the subset of people who are willing to pay for a game like this is probably not a great amount. It just doesn't make sense. Hence why they can't get any funding at all. No significant interest = No purchases = No ROI = No Investment.

For these aforementioned reasons and more, they are never going to get an sort of investor...

So what about the future moving forward? What options does the team realistically have? What would I recommend to them if I were running the show, so to speak?


I suggest a dual-prong approach...

1) Release a TitanicHG Simulator on Steam (and make it known that this is not the same as the TitanicHG GAME) and charge a reasonable price for it, say $19.99USD in Early Access mode. This Simulator would basically be the entire static model that they have created of the Titanic so far up to this point in time, minus any WIP portions that aren't condusive to being revealed at the moment. Releasing a seperate Simulator of Titanic allows them to by pass the legal issues that they otherwise would encounter if they were to release the Titanic GAME on steam and still charge folks that already previously pitched into their many past crowd funding campaigns at levels that would have entitled these crowdfunders a free copy of the game when it came out etc... and releasing such a TitanicHG Simulator would also bring in much needed funds to help towards keeping the team alive/together long enough to proceed to the next lead in.....

2) Be open to starting a liquidation process whereby you allow the open community to essentially buy back the project in full this time around. No one is going to crowd fund you guys anymore, forget about it... Instead, come forward and be open with the community and tell the community that you would be open to a certain number in mind that if reached you would open source and publish the entire TitanicHG project, all assets, all code, all source, work products, derivative works, etc surrounding the entire TitanicHG project, including but not limited to the entire Unreal Engine 4 Titanic HG Project and all associated and related files and data themselvs etc .... You would agree to not only publicly publish all of this, but to almost give it a public domain copyright, to completely open source everything free and clear and liberated for the community and anyone, everyone else to use as they wish without any royalty payments, license use restrictions, or any other payments or contingencies. Essentially, release what you have so far to the public domain. Contact a couple of independent appraisals to get a ballpark number in terms of a fair market value of this, then tell the community that if this number can be reached, you will release the project to the world. Let us take this off your hands while it is still worth something instead of keeping it locked down forever until one day its worth nothing to no one...

If you ask me, I would price it between $25,000 and $75,000


Good luck!

[bochen777]

http://www.paullee.com/titanic/HandG2016/