Posted December 02, 2013
Sorry if this was posted before, but I didn't find anything about this.
Now everyone knows that SR1 and SR2 were removed pretty much everywhere but the former Soviet countries. Why is that? Licensing issues. The reason why was actually posted on SNK-Games (the new lead developers') Facebook a while ago and I thought I should share.
The games themselves use dat files. Well, if you would check, you might find that those are just renamed MP3 files. For which Elemental Games (the original developer that lost a ton of the original employees who formed Katauri) did not have a license for. So the original games illegally used the MP3 codecs, hence the licensing issues. 1C found out about this in 2012 and immediately took down the games from every international site that offered it, I think.
Now two questions that you might have-
1. Why is the game still available in the former Soviet territories? The laws there are far more lax on this kind of behaviour than they are here and it's very unlikely that 1C would get into trouble for that, but here, the developers of the closed codec would be all over 1C. If the game isn't for sale, they can't really do much, now can they?
2. Why didn't they just patch it? Okay, this is a good question, and the most likely reason is that 1C doesn't have the source code to the games or they have it but nobody can decipher it and/or they don't see a reason to do so. It's not very effective to release patches to 10 year old games. (SR2 was in 2004 and SR1 was a few years before that)
How do I know this? I'm Russian, I've played Space Rangers since I was a kid, and I'm a huge fan, even having the unused tracks from the first game that weren't in the game itself. And to those that want to say thanks, you're welcome.
tl:dr Elemental Games done derped hard and illegally used MP3 files in the games, 1C doesn't want to fix this mess, decided to take the entire game down.
Now everyone knows that SR1 and SR2 were removed pretty much everywhere but the former Soviet countries. Why is that? Licensing issues. The reason why was actually posted on SNK-Games (the new lead developers') Facebook a while ago and I thought I should share.
The games themselves use dat files. Well, if you would check, you might find that those are just renamed MP3 files. For which Elemental Games (the original developer that lost a ton of the original employees who formed Katauri) did not have a license for. So the original games illegally used the MP3 codecs, hence the licensing issues. 1C found out about this in 2012 and immediately took down the games from every international site that offered it, I think.
Now two questions that you might have-
1. Why is the game still available in the former Soviet territories? The laws there are far more lax on this kind of behaviour than they are here and it's very unlikely that 1C would get into trouble for that, but here, the developers of the closed codec would be all over 1C. If the game isn't for sale, they can't really do much, now can they?
2. Why didn't they just patch it? Okay, this is a good question, and the most likely reason is that 1C doesn't have the source code to the games or they have it but nobody can decipher it and/or they don't see a reason to do so. It's not very effective to release patches to 10 year old games. (SR2 was in 2004 and SR1 was a few years before that)
How do I know this? I'm Russian, I've played Space Rangers since I was a kid, and I'm a huge fan, even having the unused tracks from the first game that weren't in the game itself. And to those that want to say thanks, you're welcome.
tl:dr Elemental Games done derped hard and illegally used MP3 files in the games, 1C doesn't want to fix this mess, decided to take the entire game down.
