Heritage Global Patents & Trademarks is currently conducting a sealed-bid auction of QC Games' IP, which includes the popular ARPG Breach, its technology, trademarks, and service layer. Dallas Dickinson, CEO of QC Games, made a statement on the exact details that bidders can expect:
Breach and its underlying technologies contain cutting-edge modifications to the popular AAA Unreal 4 game engine, allowing for best in-class responsive action RPG combat in a scalable, latency-tolerant server-authoritative model. The game itself represents over 3 years of work by the developers of many of the most popular online games of the past 20 years. [...] You can bid on the overall PC game (complete with the art, story and world IP), or on its underlying technology, broken into two parts: 1) the online Action RPG tech that allows for the creation of your own ARPG in Unreal and 2) the proprietary service layer that can support any cross-platform Game-as-a-Service you intend to run.More specifically, the auction consists of three lots. The first lot comprises the PC-based asymmetric online ARPG Breach, its trademark as well as the QC Games trademark, the full copy of the game including code and assets for use on PC (noting that the console rights are held by En Masse Entertainment). This lot includes the Breach world with its intellectual property story, characters, and rights, the client and server (developed on Unreal Engine 4), the service (developed on Orleans), all required toolset for build, test, and deployment of the game (developed primarily in C#). Breach is designed with a flexible business model, currently as a free-to-play game with microtransactions, but could also transition into a retail business model. Estimates are that it includes over 100,000 total players and 20,000 paying players.
The second lot consists of the "online ARPG RPG Technology," which is built on top of the Unreal Engine 4 license. It's described as a cutting-edge, server-authoritative modification to the Unreal Engine 4. It is useful for a studio that is looking for a "significant leg up on creating responsive, latency-tolerant action combat, combining Ranged, Melee and Magical RPG abilities and attacks." It can be prototyped easily using Breach assets but would require replacement and modification for new intellectual property as well. It is valued at more than $2 million in terms of engineering and development of a client-server model.
The final lot consists of the "QC Games Proprietary Service Layer technology for running Games As a Service," which is "GAAS Engine-agnostic and platform-agnostic," built to work with the Unreal Engine 4, but will support any client/server engine as well. It's built for cross-platform play and progression, as well as geared for Steam and En Masse storefront platforms, but will support any other distribution channel. It dynamically scales your service to meet server population requirements, as well as running shared services such as Friends, Chat, Matchmaking.
The deadline for bid submission is August 14.
What do you think of the auction? Will THQ Nordic pick it up in its voracious IP-acquiring frenzy? Let us know in the comments below!
