Legal EAW Full Game Downloads

there must be a case to make EAW abandonware, and make it free for us to post our new versions, freely.

It is currently the name of a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari, SA (formerly Infogrames), who is the current owner of the Atari brand and various other properties formerly belonging to Hasbro Interactive. It was formed in 2001, when IESA acquired Hasbro Interactive and proceeded to rename it to Infogrames Interactive.[4] In 2003, IESA then changed the company name entirely to Atari Interactive, Inc. as part of its world wide reorganization to focus on use of the Atari brand.[5]

But to stay relevant in the business, when you have a great franchise, keep working on it. World of WarCraft is what, ten years old? When they released the game, who would've known ten years later it'd still be receiving updates and patches with new features? That's the amazing thing about PC games. You start, and if you make a mistake you correct it. Sometimes you have to stop it because clearly there's no market and no one loves your game. Okay, too bad, let's move on to the next one.

But as a publisher, we can stay relevant and engage with the community for one year, two years, three years.

"When they released the game, who would've known ten years later it'd still be receiving updates and patches with new features?"

Support by source code release
Main article: List of commercial video games with later released source code

The problem of missing technical support for a software can be most effectively solved when the source code becomes available. Therefore several companies decided to release the source code specifically to allow the user communities to provide further technical software support (bug fixes, compatibility adaptions etc.) themselves,[56][57] e.g. by community patches or source ports to new computing platforms.

Id Software and 3D Realms are early proponents in this practice, releasing the source code for the game engines of some older titles under a free software license (but not the actual game content, such as levels or textures). Also Falcon 4.0's lead designer Kevin Klemmick argued in 2011 that availability of the source code of his software for the community was a good thing:

I honestly think this [source code release] should be standard procedure for companies that decide not to continue to support a code base.
—Kevin Klemmick, interviewed by Bertolone, Giorgio (2011-03-12). "Interview with Kevin Klemmick - Lead Software Engineer for Falcon 4.0". Cleared-To-Engage. Archived from the original on 2011-03-18. Retrieved 2014-08-31.

The chilling effect of drawing a possible lawsuit can discourage release of source code. Efforts to persuade IBM to release OS/2 as open source software were ignored[58] since some of the code was co-developed by Microsoft.

Nevertheless, several notable examples of successfully opened commercial software exist, for instance, the web browser Netscape Communicator, which was released by Netscape Communications on March 31, 1998.[59] The development was continued under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation and Netscape Communicator became the basis of several browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox.[60]

Another important example for open sourced general software is the office suite StarOffice which was released by Sun Microsystems in October 2000 as OpenOffice.org[61] and is in continued development as LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.

There are also many examples in the video game domain: Revolution Software released their game Beneath a Steel Sky as freeware and gave the engine's source code to the authors of ScummVM to add support for the game. Other examples are Myth II,[62] Call to Power II[63] and Microsoft's Allegiance[57] which were released to allow the community to continue the support.

I've not had a reply from Atari yet. I suppose they are having to find out what the game was!

What would be a big bother is their release of theaters such as SPAW for a fee, as these contain work from several modders.

Greetings!

Unfortunately, we no longer provide support for this title.


Sincerely,

Atari Customer Support
http://support.atari.com/

Hi AngleOff.

At the time of the agreement, EAW was still available as a pay download, from Atari, and several other pay sites, so we were never allowed to offer full downloads.

In this way it is also understood that no such discussion or game development shall pertain to, be directed at, or be in furtherance of any activity that seeks to, does or will exploit such game code or the game title for any commercial or profitable purpose, that thereby diminishes or dilutes the good will in or to such game and/or its trademark (in part or whole), or that otherwise disparages or casts a negative light on Atari Interactive in any form, any of its affiliates, and/or their respective intellectual property rights, business activities, or ownership of the aforementioned title proffered upon this agreement.

I didn't know there was anything in the agreement that stated we could not offer free, full, modded downloads.

So what happened in the end? I still have my EAW CD, but is there a way to have a one step install from there?

And yes, I still lurk around the forum every week. Still no game gave me what EAW did back in the old times.