Fredrik Wester,
I am publicly addressing you as I feel it’s my duty to the Magna Mundi fans to do the utmost to save the game and allow them to experience the work of the very special and talented team I have the pleasure to lead.
I also feel I have the duty to the team I lead to try to save Magna Mundi. The involvement of the team on the project and how all worked together towards the single objective of delivering the game was impressive. I was still deciding things minutes before I was warned by a Spanish team member that the game had been cancelled.
After reading that you were the one coming up with the idea of turning Magna Mundi into a commercial project, I feel we stand exactly at the same level of responsibility towards the fans: I created the brand and coordinated both the amateur and the professional projects and you decided to take advantage of it by producing a commercial game and in the process take ownership of the brand.
In the first scenario everybody wins. This scenario demands leadership, charisma and ability to compromise. And those are exactly the qualities I am asking for you to show while trying to summon them myself. It’s a scenario where, to put it simply, a normal release date is set (I have no problem about a release in two or three months time to accommodate your release schedule), the game gets normally released and UV will continue to assume its responsibilities from then on. If for any reason you want UV to stop supporting Magna Mundi after the release thus allowing Paradox to take control of any future development within the scope of Magna Mundi, we can certainly talk about that.
At present the situation is clear. Your decision to cancel the game will lead to a legal battle where Universo Virtual will try its best to beat Paradox, while Paradox will be doing the same to Universo Virtual. All the while I will neither give you the Magna Mundi engine nor return to you a single euro that you spent financing the development of the game.
Courts apart, I am not one who fears the judgement of the public. I invite everyone who can come to Lisbon to check for them the game and make a judgement about it.
In my book, cancelling a game at this stage and in these conditions while demanding back the money used for funding its development for two and a half years, demanding also the engine of the game, continuing to enjoy the ownership of the brand and retaining the possibility of releasing Magna Mundi for you, has a far uglier name than “cancellation”.
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