I know it was a few pages back, but the talk of IllFonic being the next in a long line of loser companies caught in the undertow of Rooster Teeth's sinking reminded me of some egregious bullshit they got up to when they were a mere budding tumor working on their first project:
In late-2009/early-2010 IllFonic
purchased the game Nexuiz from project founder Lee Vermeulen. Being a high-skill Quake successor the game had a very dedicated audience, and an equally active development scene owing to it's open-source nature. That second point is what drove the deal - they thought they were being offered the chance to snap up a previously free game, close the source, then force everyone into buying it to keep playing in the now walled garden.
Of course, this was a retarded idea because the GPL it was on requires all involved contributors on a project to sign off on any changes to the license. Since there was no way in hell every single one of the
hundred-some people who had worked on the codebase would sign off on the game being sold out from under them, IllFonics simply opted to march forward in the hopes nobody would notice,
which everyone did. Eventually they backed off a little, realizing that the only thing they were really legally entitled to from the deal with Vermeulen was the name "Nexuiz". Afterwards Lee took them for a ride through development hell resulting from the full directorial control he had over the game thanks to the intitial contract they had signed with him. The game ended up being a middling turd, the original development continued as "
Xonotic", and the studio limped along quietly while slowly rehabilitating their brand by sucking up to the e-celebs and journalists willing to chew cud for them before finally resurfacing years later.
Anyways, my roundabout point with this story is that it takes a real parasitic slug to look at a partnership with the likes of IllFonic and think of it as good business. Their whole history paints a picture of a genuinely reprehensible studio that has nothing but disdain for their audiences; a real mirror into the souls of the leftovers at RT, it's subsidiaries and their ilk who would jump at scraps like this they get thrown their way.
