Why has RO never been licensed/franchised?

[Yuzo]

How come RO never licensed the legal right to open a private server? Surely they could make good money off private servers. Or even like a hush fee of sorts....Gravity approaches private server, says "you give us 50% of your earnings and we allow you to exist and make money."


ok this is not a great question but I'm up there in the clouds. what do you think? I understand the private servers can be erratic, as their representatives can be unprofessional at times. btw who can buy me a new graphics card?

[Woon]

Don't quote me on the exact numbers because it's been a long time.
There was that one time EuRO went a bit crazy and started reaching out to all private servers and asking them to shut down or face a lawsuit. I believe their threat was 100k fee and 10 years in jail.

The thread is still probably somewhere in the RMS archives since some people were seriously concerned. I was one of those people.
I didn't really wanna shut down my server and bend over for them so at the time I had my team start digging. EuRO was actually private server at first. They were FranceRO or some crap, and they bought the rights to France fro Gravity for a pretty nice number, something like 100k USD. I think slightly more, then after a few months they gave an additional 150k to the rights to market to Europe, and voila EuRO was born.

Again this is all from memory and their contract with Gravity is available in the public records.  We took days reading through their contract and trying to figure out a way out of this. In  the end we realized that they could only target servers in Europe and they were breaching iRO contract since we hosted in USA. So we kindly asked them to fck off and if they contacted us again that we would be the ones taking them to court.

To our belief it actually worked. It was one of their marketing people trying to bring in new players from private servers. They offered "community helper" position to any server admins that merged their servers.

So to get back to the original question. Gravity has poked at the private server community every once in a while. I just don't understand why they haven't continued to do so. There is amazing money out there for them to make from private servers. Some of the older and bigger servers can directly compete with some of their official servers so I believe they are missing out.

[Insomnia2000]

My guess is that Gravity probably lacks the ability and/or manpower to actually enforce anything if they catch a private server without a proper license deal. If people could get away with not needing a license by simply hosting their server in another country they would. Then people probably wouldn't feel the need to buy a license from Gravity.

I feel like it's also probably not profitable to go after most servers either. Just because you can sue someone for $100,000 doesn't mean you'd actually get it. Even your low income people can spare the $10 it costs to open a server and have a few players. Probably wouldn't be fruitful to sue them.

I don't get why they don't go after some of the bigger servers out there, though. Servers like TalonRO and NovaRO are very well known and very profitable. I'd imagine that Gravity has some legal ground to stand on and something actual money to gain from taking them to court.

I still think any licensing thing would be too hard to enforce, however.

[Kris]

How come RO never licensed the legal right to open a private server? Surely they could make good money off private servers. Or even like a hush fee of sorts....Gravity approaches private server, says "you give us 50% of your earnings and we allow you to exist and make money."

lol this is a pretty stupid question because if private servers were licensed, nobody would play official servers. Majority of the people that played official servers was cause of stability and constant population. If a private server ever reached stability, best believe nobody would spend hours grinding on officala servers.

What gravity could have done tho is sell their rights to RO to a better video game corporation that could have done justice to RO2 but instead passed the RO brand to its branch company aka gravity incorporated to make sure RO will never have a future