Wait...wha??

[pirvix]

Ok, simple question. 3DO went bankrupt and took NWC with him, now just before that happens Ubi buys M&M for OVER 1 MILLION US DOLLARS, and Ubi than CHANGES the storyline, feel, setting.....

Why didn't they just make a diffrent title and leave the 1 MILLION US DOLLARS alone? They could've just call it Ashan or something...........

sorry for the caps everyone, just, either I'm getting something wrong here or is Ubi a complete idiot in terms of intelligent thinking...........

[Kristo]

According to last year's annual report, Ubisoft had 928.3 million euros in sales and netted 616.6 million euros in profit. When you look at it that way, $1 million to buy the Might and Magic brand name is dirt cheap. I highly doubt Heroes V and Dark Messiah would have sold as well as they did without it.

[Talin_Trollbane]

they bought it because of the name Heroes of Might & Magic.

the ordinary RPG Might & Magic they could care less about.

[mmtool]

Brand name and huge funbase (at the time). So need less money on commercials etc.

[kognefaure]

Lol, I am also confused with this!
I think they mostly bought it to exploit the Heroes serie.

AFAIK, same happened with Far Cry: it was initially developped by CryTek, and was playing on a "secret" island full of mutants and high-tech weapons. Ubisoft then bought the license of the game, and developped Far Cry 2, which actually has nothing to do with the inital story (it plays in an african country in anarchy)... So why did they buy the license???
BTW, what Ubisoft did with Far Cry is sadly a proof that the same is likely to happen with the M&M license: no official Might and magic X would be developped (that's my point of view).

[Talin_Trollbane]

it would have been better if some indie programmer bought the name, instead of Ubisoft....

Farcry 2 was epic fail, with everyone in Africa hating your guts outside the safezones, i was forced to use a trainer that enable the enemies to be killed with 1 shot when i played that game since ordinary it took like a whole clip of AK47 rounds in the head to down just one guy.

[Lord13]

As Kristo said 1milion for such a big company is really
not big deal, and yes was for the Heroes series not the
rpg one that they really wanted. Heroes 5 anyway I guess
had good sales(althought I din't like it at all). Is a strategy
of many big companies anyway to buy cheap smaller
companies' titles, an easy choise at periods to realease a
game that will already have a core of funs etc. And yes
with this way we see good series ruined and smaller
companies close, blame capitalism

[Kristo]

Lol, I am also confused with this!
I think they mostly bought it to exploit the Heroes serie.

If by "exploit" you mean "leverage the popularity of the Heroes series to generate sales," then yes, that's exactly what they did. Any sane company would do the same. Ubisoft is not deliberately running our beloved series into the ground. I'll agree it's disappointing to see the old world go away. I didn't get the game I wanted either, and I participated in the beta! Vote with your dollars, it's all you can do.

it would have been better if some indie programmer bought the name, instead of Ubisoft....

Why? So Heroes 5 could've failed before it was even halfway through development?

[Talin_Trollbane]

well Ubisoft can have your beloved Heroes, im talking about the RPG Might & Magic, not the sidetrack Heroes of Might & Magic.

[BMJedi]

I don't think Ubisoft did anything nefarious. They got a valuable franchise at a bargain basement price.

For better or for worse, the turn-based strategy game HOMM and the
party-based RPG game MM are set in the same fantasy world and are under the same license. Seperate properties to HOMM and MM do not exist.

As far as Ubi creating a new world and a new backstory, remember that NWC/3DO was doing exactly that as of HOMM IV. The culmination of the entire original epic world story was that the entire planet on which HOMM and MM occur was destroyed by the Sword of Armegeddon after HOMM III.

And I do find the story of Isabel, her demon suitor Agrael, and the others to be interesting and compelling. The political and religious tensions among the Knights/Clerics, the Necromancers, and the Wizards is also well written, IMO.

Most importantly, perhaps, the actual gameplay, with resources management, town/castle development, hero skills development, spell research, strategic combat, exploration of shrouded maps, etc., etc., is clearly HOMM gameplay to the core. The HOMM V gameplay under any other name would have invited an easy-to-prove copyright infringement lawsuit.

In other words, I maintain that Ubi did in fact need to purchase the MM property in order to publish HOMMV, and they did at least a halfway decent job on it, despite all the disappointments and issues.

It is not beyond hope that UBI might eventually try to revive the RPG side of the MM property, if their market research shows that there is a profit to be made. They could have an employee or two in their marketing department monitoring forums just like this one, so I would suggest that those hypothetical employees need to find positive comments about Ubi's efforts so that they will be encouraged to pay serious attention to what is surely a potentially highly profitable sub-market.

Would any of us true believers refuse to purchase and try an Ubi-published MMX? I would be afraid they were going to disappoint me again, but would I shell out the bucks to buy it? Heck, yes!

I've purchased HOMMV, Hammers of Fate, and Tribes of the East, and I haven't even played all of it yet. There isn't a doubt in Enroth that I would buy an MMX.

[Deadguy118]

Ubisoft bought the Might and Magic name in order to make $Money$, and they did a fairly good job with Heroes V (Dark Messiah? No.).

What people don't seem to realize is that 3DO was running the series into the ground anyways. Remember Heroes Chronicles? Remember how Heroes IV and Might and Magic IX both shipped with a ton of bugs because of the rush to get them out the door? Plus, the uniqueness (Sci-Fi stuff) of the M&M world was already destroyed after the Forge was not put into Armageddon's Blade.

Yeah, Ubisoft's world is pretty dumb and unoriginal, but at least the series lives on in an official capacity (as opposed to fan-made projects that take forever before being canceled coughMMTcough). Too bad it seems that they bought it mostly for the Heroes part, and not for the Might and Magic. (but at least the Fan-Made MMX is being developed)

[Macros the Black]

And I do find the story of Isabel, her demon suitor Agrael, and the others to be interesting and compelling. The political and religious tensions among the Knights/Clerics, the Necromancers, and the Wizards is also well written, IMO.

Ummmm.. It was horrible lol. One of the worst stories ever imo.

Would any of us true believers refuse to purchase and try an Ubi-published MMX? I would be afraid they were going to disappoint me again, but would I shell out the bucks to buy it? Heck, yes!

I've purchased HOMMV, Hammers of Fate, and Tribes of the East, and I haven't even played all of it yet. There isn't a doubt in Enroth that I would buy an MMX.

Yeah I would buy it in a heartbeat and probably know I'm gonna get dissapointed.

[jeff]

They bought it to flag games that otherwise would have languished and more importantly they hoped to cash in on a built in fan base that desperately wanted to see the series continue. They succeeded and have collected enough for their investment that nothing more need be done. If H-V is the best they can do then RIP M&M.