deja65: Isn't it weird that Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 is being removed due to expiring licences? As far as i know only Atari has the full distribution rights to this series and the games are here because of Atari.Since when was RT 3 a licenced product? This is really confusing.If somebody knows this a bit better,please enlighten us ;).Cheers
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 has a complicated history.
Atari/Infogrames commissioned Frontier to develop it after they completed the two expansion passes for RCT2, Chris Sawyer was attached but primarily as an advisor/consultant. The game was created on Frontier's in-house engine (Cobra) which they still use to this day albeit more modernised. Frontier own the copyrights to the code/assets and receive a royalty off every unit sold (as does Chris Sawyer).
Fast forward to 2013 and Atari are in the midst of Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings trying to sell off their assets, their license to the RCT franchise included, the price tag $3.5m. I expect Frontier would have been interested but at that time they were putting all their money into the pot along with Kickstarter money to self-publish Elite Dangerous so they didn't have that kind of cash on hand at that time. However in October 2013 Frontier signed a deal with Atari taking a drop in their royalty rates in exchange for publishing rights on platforms the game wasn't already released on. This was how Frontier managed to publish the game on iOS back in 2015.
Fast forward to January of last year and Frontier sued Atari for a royalties shortfall of $2.2m. Whilst we don't know exactly what happened in this court case Frontier stated the following in their half-yearly statement to their shareholders about 3 months ago:
In October 2017 we came to a settlement over the outstanding historic royalties owed by Atari on RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, payment of which is being made in instalments and will be completed by 31 May 2018.
The timing of this action would seem to imply that perhaps Frontier got more than money in that settlement and they themselves will be becoming the new distributors of the game. This could be a good thing as they still have the code/assets/engine so a remaster could be a possibility. At the very least updating to take advantage of multi-threaded CPUs.
Interesting times