Titanic: Honor and Glory (TitanicHG THG) is a scam

My proposed solution for the future of Titanic HG -- Open Letter to Tom and crew

https://www.titanichg.com/

https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/titanic-honor-and-glory/internet/titanic-honor-and-glory-four-funnels-entertainment-co-and-vintage-digital-revival-llc-t-1378063

For the TLDR skip to the bottom...

So I'll get to the point... Tom and crew have been looking for outside investors and said "investors" have been "just around the corner" for the past five years or more by now... and post-COVID, I'm sorry to say,  that its just not going to happen, at least not in the way they imagined it... No one is going to be giving them millions of dollars to finish making this project/game as Tom envisions it to be, period. full stop.

No financial investor, angel investor, venture capitalists etc is ever going to invest in this project, its just too risky and would most likely end up with negative return on investment or entire loss of principle invested... lets face it, the money guys aren't dumb people, they go where there is best rate of return and if TitanicHG as a project was financially appealing they would have found an investor by now... if this project was very appealing from a monetary return on investment standpoint, they would have investors chasing them, not the other way around...

In terms of AAA title games, there is not really a market for mainstream Titanic game, at best it would be a small niche. For the sake of argument lets say I'm wrong and some large gaming dev/publisher felt they wanted to give Titanic a chance, and they wanted to make a Titanic game for PC and consoles... Its almost certain that they would have a storyline surrounding that, and they would already have their own plot, characters, stories etc and would never hand over creative aspect to Tom's TitanicHG... any large respectable studio could afford to hire their own team of dedicated modelers, animators, script writers, game developers etc etc and wouldn't need to collaborate with TitanicHG/ Tom/FourFunnels/etc... They would be much better starting from scratch using latest and greatest tools, technologies, design methods, etc rather than say attempting to license the existing (but unfinished) TitanicHG static model from the TitanicHG team, since this project is going on better part of almost a decade now and its already aging and showing such age... When this TitanicHG was first ported over from Crysis mod to Unreal, the then state of the art graphics card was a GTX 600 series, today we have the RTX3090 coming out, a 50 fold improvement in terms of raw performance. We are now in the age of 8k gaming, Real time ray tracing RTX, volumetric particle effects and everything else, and infinite polygons/virtual memory management with the debut of Unreal Engine 5 and its technological breakthroughs... There is nothing proprietary about the Titanic itself, and the THG team obviously does not hold any patents, copyright, to "The Titanic" itself, so any major AAA gaming group that wanted to make a Titanic game would never considering going with THG (and thus handing over creative control) or even licensing what is an incomplete Titanic model that has now aged by more than half a decade.... Just ask Microsoft if they still want to license Outerra for their next Flight Simulator lol

Okay, so what about small time indie game publishers and small game development groups that want to do a Titanic sort of game? If they partner up with THG team, odds are knowing Tom, he wouldn't settle for anything less than absolute creative control and basically hijacking any sort of collaboration and taking over the entire project... Most indie devs teams wouldn't be amenable to that sort of style and besides, at that point they really just become an investor rather than a true collaboration... that only leaves the window open for licensing the static model itself... Forget the fact that the TitanicHG static model is nowhere near 100% completed, and lets pretend for now that it wasn't already more than 7 years old and aging rapidly, the fact of the matter is, any indie team that wished to do a Titanic game would only marginally benefit from licensing the TitanicHG model, since as we all know, modeling the ship itself is the easiest part of any Titanic game, its the everything else, the characters, the animations, the physics, the storyline and other gameplay mechanics etc that is the hardest part... so if they blow their budget by licensing TitanicHG model, they would still have to finish the rest of it themselves and update it to Unreal 5 when it comes out next year, and then they are back at square one, the exact spot that the TitanicHG indie team is at, which is a model but nothing else and still needing to complete everything else but now they are out whatever money they spent on licensing the model from Tom and what are they gonna do? A kickstarter or indiegogo to get more funds when the niche market is already saturated and anyone interested in any Titanic sim/game have already pitched into the TitanicHG crowdfunded from yesteryear so there goes that out the window.... so no, the prospects of any indie game dev interested in making a Titanic game partnering up with THG team is small to none, and licensing the model from THG only makes sense if its economically feasible (if they can agree on price/cost of license) but knowing Tom and knowing the history of the THG group, they would never agree to a reasonable price on model licensing and would feel that if they let that out the door then they have nothing left (which is sadly true)

For these aforementioned reasons and more, they are never going to get an sort of investor...

So what about the future moving forward? What options does the team realistically have? What would I recommend to them if I were running the show, so to speak?


I suggest a dual-prong approach...

1) Release a TitanicHG Simulator on Steam (and make it known that this is not the same as the TitanicHG GAME) and charge a reasonable price for it, say $19.99USD in Early Access mode. This Simulator would basically be the entire static model that they have created of the Titanic so far up to this point in time, minus any WIP portions that aren't conducive to being revealed at the moment. Releasing a separate Simulator of Titanic allows them to by pass the legal issues that they otherwise would encounter if they were to release the Titanic GAME on steam and still charge folks that already previously pitched into their many past crowd funding campaigns at levels that would have entitled these crowdfunders a free copy of the game when it came out etc... and releasing such a TitanicHG Simulator would also bring in much needed funds to help towards keeping the team alive/together long enough to proceed to the next lead in.....

2) Be open to starting a liquidation process whereby you allow the open community to essentially buy back the project in full this time around. No one is going to crowd fund you guys anymore, forget about it... Instead, come forward and be open with the community and tell the community that you would be open to a certain number in mind that if reached you would open source and publish the entire TitanicHG project, all assets, all code, all source, work products, derivative works, etc surrounding the entire TitanicHG project, including but not limited to the entire Unreal Engine 4 Titanic HG Project and all associated and related files and data themselvs etc .... You would agree to not only publicly publish all of this, but to almost give it a public domain copyright, to completely open source everything free and clear and liberated for the community and anyone, everyone else to use as they wish without any royalty payments, license use restrictions, or any other payments or contingencies. Essentially, release what you have so far to the public domain. Contact a couple of independent appraisals to get a ballpark number in terms of a fair market value of this, then tell the community that if this number can be reached, you will release the project to the world. Let us take this off your hands while it is still worth something instead of keeping it locked down forever until one day its worth nothing to no one...

If you ask me, I would price it between $25,000 and $75,000


Good luck!