Grand news! Gametap releases rights of MOUL to Cyan!!!!

GameTap gives Myst Online back to Cyan. Cyan says it's opening the game to fan development

After several months of negotiation, Spokane-based Cyan Worlds regained the rights to its complex immersive game, Myst Online.

Company
President Rand Miller said the deal was arranged with GameTap, the
Turner Entertainment subsidiary which published Myst Online for about a
year. The company shut down Myst Online in April 2008, saying the
closure was due to business reasons.

Ardent fans of Myst and
Myst Online have been vocal about having a hand in resurrecting the
game and adding more content to the project. Up to now, Cyan Worlds has
resisted approving that option, pending the regaining of the publishing
rights from GameTap.

Miller said the new plan is for the game's fans to have that freedom to create new environments and new content.

He
added it's uncertain if the revival will lead to a longterm commitment
by Cyan to continue developing the game. The regaining of the rights is
a step in that direction, but Miller said it's unclear where the
experiment in shared, user-created content will lead.

Cyan Worlds itself has downsized its game-development staff to less than 10.

The
delay in regaining the rights to Myst Online was due to both Cyan and
GameTap working through a gradual understanding of how the game's
development might proceed.

Miller said Cyan did not pay any
upfront money to regain the publishing rights. But at some point, if a
commercially successful revival comes about, the two companies have an
agreement on how each will be compensated, he added.

"They
realize that unless something happened (to revive Myst Online), it
wasn’t going to live. And if it didn't live, no one would ever get
anything out of it."

Cyan Worlds made its first breakthrough
game, Myst, in 1994. Later versions elaborated upon the notion of a
lost D'ni civilization and its "ages" or areas where participants are
allowed to explore.

The online version of Myst was an ambitious
3-D world with rich and constantly changing circumstances and
interaction with other game-players.

Miller said the new, revived version will charge participants a minimal fee of perhaps $25 per six months.

"That's
not being done to make money," he said. Rather the charge will be to
cover the costs of adding servers at Cyan Worlds to handle the game
play, said Miller.

Source: http://www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/txt/a...ostID=6114#more

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