Notes on Ryzom (Feb. 2008)
Xavier posted a recap on the legal process. As we all feared, we could be in for a long wait, as it appears GameForge GmbH never paid Nevrax in full to purchase Ryzom, during the previous liquidation.
Here’s my understanding of where the liquidation stands, from the little info I could glean here and there. There may be some inaccuracies, but it gives a general idea. This is an evolving document; nothing written below may be considered final, or even accurate.
The liquidation: facts
Ryzom’s liquidation was filed on October 1st, 2007. The deadline to complete the liquidation is two years.
The GameForge France branch, created by GameForge Germany after last year’s bankruptcy, had people on payroll, former Nevrax employees, required by French law to be kept as per the former bankruptcy proceedings. The company stopped paying the bills on August 27.
It’s a liquidation this time, which means the game will be sold to the highest bidder, without any restrictions as to what they can do with it or who they must have on payroll.
I have heard rumors that at least two potential buyers showed interest for the game. But they have yet to know what’s for sale. As far as debtors, they had to make their claim before February 5th, 2008 (two months from the time the liquidation was made official in the Registry of Commerce Journal).
Why is the legal process taking so long?
Little information has been made public about assets. On December 8th, a debt was added for unpaid salaries, but still nothing about what’s for sale.
Since GameForge France no longer exists, that means there no longer is any activity, and the French state does not need to cover expenses. The liquidator therefore has no reason to consider the GameForge file to be urgent. This wasn’t the case for the Nevrax bankruptcy a year ago.
One additional complication, that we heard about as soon as the liquidation announcement was made, is that of determining whether payment of the last bankruptcy was made in full: recent developments show GameForge GmbH only gave an advance payment of 10% when they took over from Nevrax, which could make the process last for even longer than originally expected (anywhere between three months and three semesters to resolve that kind of dispute, see Xavier’s post mentioned above).
To sum up, the bad news is, this could take a while. The good news is, the source code will most probably be up for sale eventually.
The GameForge France staff was still legally employed until January, 2008, even though the branch office was closed on October 1st, and they were no longer paid. As of December 8, the liquidation document mentions 21 employees and as debt, the sum of unpaid salaries.
What of the servers?
Servers were closed February 11th, without forewarning. GameForge GmbH had announced the servers would be shut down three weeks earlier.
The shards had technically been kept open without interruption since GameForge took the game over. The costs of operating the shards was unclear, but they are run from Germany, and possibly from GameForge GmbH’s own servers. Should the liquidation proceed and Ryzom be sold, there’s no telling whether GameForge will have kept the game data (I don’t know if they’re required to do so or not).
The ryzom.com website went down some time ago, because the domain name expired. It was registered again at the Schlund+Partners AG registrar, based in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The heart of the matter: the source code
There is no telling whether the source code will be up for sale. However, the fact that GameForge didn’t fully pay for Ryzom, and that the company stopped paying the bills is interpreted by many who know the legal process, as a sign that GameForge GmbH has not fully met its responsibilities towards Ryzom, and therefore as an indication that the source code is indeed up for sale.
It was feared that GameForge GmbH (the umbrella company that created GameForge France after the previous bankruptcy) did purchase the source code back from GameForge France, and that it would not be put on the list of assets. This scenario has now become unlikely.
Should the source code not be listed as an asset, Ryzom’s fate would then be solely in the hands of GameForge. They could decide to keep the game going, or use the source code to create another game. Or shelf it.
Potential buyers
It’s almost a certainty now that the game will be purchased; it’s only a question of what the new owner will do with it…
Ryzom.org (old Nevrax) already bid on Ryzom last year. They have notified the liquidator and might bid for the game again this time around. A few of the originators of Ryzom are in it, and want to find a workable way to have the game developed and run with the player community. They want to make the game Open Source as well, which was the original idea of Ryzom.
There is still a fair possibility that GameForge GmbH will take back the game, and on their own terms this time. However, GameForge cannot show too keen an interest to the liquidator, since that would mean they liquidated GameForge France on purpose to get rid of the dead weight of the French team.
A US marketing company employee created a toon around October 10 (if I remember correctly), who showed fair interest in the game; I got the idea that they would collect data on user behavior (logging patterns, participation in certain events, percentage of PvP, etc.) to either make use of that data internally, or more likely to sell analytics to their customers. There is no telling whether that company followed suit on that idea, but I wager it didn’t cost them much to tell the liquidator they wanted to be in the loop.
And there may obviously be additional (quiet) bidders.
In the meanwhile, all we can do is wait and see…
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