Valve Is Not Interested In Machinima

Here is a direct quote from Valve:

"We are not interested in licensing our technology or IP for machinima. This includes providing copyright approvals."

Well, that about says it all. Valve has no interest in machinima. It is really unfortunate because the Source Engine is so amazing and they offer such great tools for creating machinima.

What does this mean for Source Engine machinima? Probably nothing. Most people will continue to do what they do until they are told directly not to do it. But this does change things for those of us who look beyond YouTube popularity as what we want to achieve.

Source Engine can make amazing machinima. However, you cannot do much with it other than put it on YouTube, hope for a lot of views and then maybe hope that those views lead to somebody taking interest in you.

And what if they do take interest in you, then what? You can't actually use the Source Engine to make anything for anybody to use. Even joining some festivals will prove risky because some ask for extensive copyright permissions. This means YouTube Partner and Revenue Sharing is out of the question as well. I still have no idea how machinima.com does it and Valve would not comment on the subject.

I don't want to give the wrong idea and make it sound like we are giving up Source Engine machinima after our first try or anything. We still love the engine and the machinima that comes out of it and of course still have Shelf Life chapters to work on, we just feel very disappointed in Valve and the lack of interest they have in machinima. There is clearly no real future with Valve or Source Engine machinima other than personal projects free to the community.

This may lead to people moving away from Source Engine machinima and toward alternatives with licensing options. We were just given the iClone software that looked great already but sounds even better now that we know where Valve stands on machinima. Who knows what else we will look into, Source Engine is all we have known up until now.

Well, that's the news from the Valve vs. Machinima front. Thought it might be interesting to some of you.

iClone vs Garry's Mod: Excited to Compare

We were honored to receive the jury award at MachinExpo 2009 that included full versions of iClone 4 Pro and 3DXchange from Reallusion.

It is exciting that we won this award because we were wondering how the movie making software packages out there that are being used for machinima compare to the actual games being used to create machinima and iClone 4 Pro seems to be one of the best.

Now at some point we will need to put our thoughts in on the debate over whether movies made using software solely designed for making movies should be fully considered to be in the machinima proper genre but either way the outcome is still animated films created in real time so they are definitely in the same family to say the least. It may be that there should just be sub genres for machinima so all the platforms still fall under machinima but developers can specify there area...but again this is another discussion that would take over this post.

We have never used any movie making software to create films and so it will be interesting to compare the difference between at least iClone and our working environment, Garry's Mod.

It may take us a while to get deep into iClone because we are busy with Shelf Life but eventually we hope to see how far we can take it as well. It may be that we separate the two into sub genres since the production process and techniques are so very different.

This will likely also lead into a discussion concerning how festivals are conducted and how it may be useful to separate genres considering the vast differences between production platforms.

At first glance though iClone 4 Pro appears to be a very powerful platform that perhaps opens the door to a lot of film makers.

We would like to once again thank Reallusion for sponsoring the MachinExpo 2009 and awarding us with this great software package. Also a big thanks to the organizers of the Expo for making it all possible and creating a great machinima event for the community.