Tribes 2 on Steam

WHiTe

I was wondering if anyone has considered talking to Dynamix or Steam or whoever, for the possibility to introduce Tribes 2 to Steam. Maybe as a free game? If anyone knows a way or whom to contact in regards to even the slightest possibility i would appreciate it. Thank you.

rJay

Dynamix went out of business a longgg time ago... Hi Rez Studios owns Tribes 2 now, and they just released it for free a few months ago (officially). They'd have to work with Steam.

Locus

That isn't true. Tribes 2 has been free for years and years and years. I used to get the CD's to install it in the mail, and thats where I first started playing it. In the mid 2000's, Dynamix and all it's video games were aquired by Sierra Online, which was then absorbed by their parent company, Activision(Blizzard). During Sierra's hold on the title, they released another game, Tribes: Vengeance. Which wasn't nearly as popular as their earlier counterparts, Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2. A few popular members of the tribes community heard that Sierra was soon to be absorbed, and begged executives of Sierra to make the three tribes game both free and open source. Later, Hi-Rez acquired the Tribes franchise and upon attempting to make the games paid again, found it impossible, and as such announced it becoming free as if THEY were the ones who made it free, which isn't true.

Hi-Rez is basically the scum of the game development world. They do nothing but steal franchises and clone games. They cloned League of Legends to create Smite, and clone Overwatch to Create Paladins, and bought Tribes from Blizzard to create a shittier version of Tribes, which could have been really good. They do no design work, they just take everybody elses ideas. It's sad really. A bigger shame is that Smite and Paladins aren't THAT bad. I have both of them, as they are good alternatives to the other games, especially for somebody like me who can't handle overwatch, but CAN handle Paladins. If they would just make their own damn game, it would be a hit. But they are too lazy to do so.


TL;DR: Hi-Rez did not make the tribes series free, Sierra did some years ago. Its only when Hi-Rez bought Tribes did they pretend like they were the ones that made the decision for it to be free. You can probably still find the forum post from 2007 where a guy announced having convinced Sierra to make tribes free.

Edit: I looked and found that it was in 2010 that hi-rez aquired the Tribes IP, long after I was downloading and playing it for free on all my computers.

Krash

Just a bit of clarification there, the franchise has never been in the hands of Activision/Blizzard, though it was for the bulk of its life the property of Vivendi, which later became the principle owner of that company. I believe the history went something closer to this:

• Dynamix was purchased by Sierra in 1990, which at the time was an independent publisher. In the mid-90s, Sierra was bought up (along with a few other companies, such as Blizzard) and set in motion the events that ultimately lead to Vivendi controlling the collective businesses, and...
• In 2000 (yes, even prior to the release of Tribes 2), Vivendi/Sierra began the process of shuttering Dynamix, and as such. Tribes 2 did end up being Sierra's most successful release of 2001, which did afford it some patches (leading up to the final re-release version with a handful of community contributions) and allowance to continue running servers of the underlying systems, but beyond that had little favour despite the relatively large community following.
• GarageGames was founded in 2000 by former Dynamix crew to sell the Tribes 2 engine (then called the "V12" engine, before being rebranded to "Torque") to indies in a similar intended model to how Unity operates today.
• Vivendi put Irrational to work on "Tribes 3" (I believe in some deal including SWAT 4), which the community did have very high hopes for, and we were given plenty of opportunity to provide input to the developers, but unfortunately following the Vengeance beta, a lot of the feedback was negative, and diehard fans of the series weren't feeling it. Within a few months of release, I recall hearing that only about 50k copies had been sold, largely due to poor marketing, though those figures might not have been entirely accurate.
• To a promote the upcoming release of Vengeance in the summer of 2004, Tribes 2 was released for free on FilePlanet. There were a limited number of keys to activate accounts on the official account server in the end, but the installer would from that point on always be free, and is still what's suggested today for use with our patch.
• GarageGames was sold off in 2007, and had its name and focus changed to InstantAction, a browser-based game platform probably most well-remembered for "Legions" (the game that later brought together the team behind "Midair" in their effort to keep it alive following InstantAction's shutdown)
• The last remaining shell of Sierra was put to bed in late 2008, which came with an announcement that the master servers for all of their online titles were being permanently shut down. We'd discussed this a handful of times previously in the Construction mod community, so it wasn't entirely unexpected -- a rudimentary version of the server list was even already in place and operation... Primarily because previously there had been long outages in prior years due to nobody being left at the company who understood how to keep it running.
• We launched the first public release of TribesNext at the start of 2009. Yay.
• When the "Sierra" brand was shuttered in 2008, InstantAction had acquired the rights to the Starsiege/Tribes franchise, although at that stage there weren't many Dynamix veterans left at the company. They didn't receive the source to Tribes 2 (which may effectively be lost to time from all accounts), but they did get the Tribes 1 source, and early in 2009 announced that they were putting it in their browser platform as a free title similar to QuakeLive. This did lead up to some nice updates being made for the first game, but their platform was struggling to stay relevant, and by the end of 2010 InstantAction was shut down. The GarageGames that exists today is a completely different entity.
• When InstantAction was closed in 2010, they sold the rights to the Tribes franchise to Hi-Rez, who initially proposed their intention to make a "Tribes Universe" MMO in a similar (though grander) vein to their existing "Global Agenda" title. Ultimately, following quite a lot of feedback that they should "re-release Tribes with updated graphics", they went a different route with their own ideas, which ended up being Ascend.
• In the time they've owned the franchise, Hi-Rez has never given any indication of an intent to re-release the earlier games for profit, nor asked us to remove our services, and did on more than one occasion approve of us in some small way, such as comments in discussions on reddit, and I believe including a link to the patch on their official free release of the early titles set in the universe.

All things equal, I would be happy to build a Steamworks integration and ensure it works alongside our existing account/listing services, but as the distribution rights are firmly in the hands of Hi-Rez, the only way that happens is with their blessing.