Pirates Of The Burning Sea: Contract Signed!

As promised, Russel "Rusty" Williams has delivered us news on the contract signing. Flying Lab Software has signed a deal with the devil himself, Sony Online Entertainment. As many of you know, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) has made some very controversial decisions when it comes to games, such as Vanguard and Star Wars: Galaxies. I am sure this news will initially upset many of you, but I encourage you to read the entire developer log Rusty has posted. It will, hopefully, quell many of your fears, worries, and complaints.

...Pirates of the Burning Sea will be published in partnership with Sony Online Entertainment's Platform Publishing. This is an important deal for Flying Lab Software and we know how passionate our community is about this issue...

...[We] weren't going to work with anybody unless we kept control of the game development and the community. That eliminated a lot of potential partners right off the bat.

Won't Sony end up buying you out the way they did Vanguard?
The difficulties Sigil had with Vanguard have been pretty well publicized at this point. We're in a very different situation financially and have no fear of shutting down. A lot of independent studios have just enough money to shove the game out the door and then go bankrupt if they don't have their next project already financed. We are very, very fortunate to not be in that situation. We're self-financed and beholden to no one. Flying Lab is in good shape. We made this decision because we wanted to, not because we had to.

We'll be releasing our big new build to the beta in the next 24 hours and after a couple weeks of shakedown time, we'll be inviting 10,000 new beta testers in to try it out!

I know you will have additional questions, and we will be here to answer them directly. First, you can stop by this thread and share your thoughts, and second, you can attend our next IRC Devchat that we've scheduled for Tuesday, June 26th at 2:00p PST (GMT -8) in #potbs-devchat on the irc.coldfront.net server.

If you only read one developer log from Pirates of the Burning Sea in your entire life, this is the one to read. I highly encourage you to read Rusty's developer log