Blizzard Entertainment Passes Up BeOS Development Oct 04, 2002 09:07 UTC, by Jess Tipton, Contributing Journalist From the Gosh-Darn department... To compliment many of the new features "Zeta" will be bringing the BeOS community an attempt to get 3rd party developers to consider the BeOS as a future development platform has begun. The first piece of feed back was received on 10/02/02 from Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard was just one of many 3rd party developers contacted to raise awareness of the Be OS - Zeta - & OBOS platforms for development in hopes of bringing choice & awareness of our efforts & existence to a commercial reality. Sadly Blizzard has stated that at the moment they are content with their current development platform & do not wish to support other operating systems at this time. The contact with Blizzard was one of 2 major development gaming firms that were contacted in the hopes of generating a future for BeOS gaming. The other gaming firm has yet to respond, but hopes are high as winning over companies to use R&D time, money, & manpower on a new application programming interface (API) will take time. Sit tight folks, for some day we may play Quake 5 on BeOS *cough* or whatever it is called in the future. Here follows the discourse of our communication with Blizzard Entertainment: "Dear Jess, Thank you for your e-mail to Blizzard. Your e-mail was forwarded to me by our sales department. Thank you for your thorough explanation on the benefits of the Be OS. However, we are very satisfied with our currentsolutions and do not plan to explore additional development tools. Thank you for your interest in working with Blizzard. Sincerely, Elaine Di Iorio Director of Business Development Blizzard Entertainment" -- Original Letter to Blizzard -- " Hello, My name is Jess Tipton marketing relations for YellowTab. I am contacting you in hopes of starting a development relationship. We represent the furthering development of the former Be OS. The BeOS & future versions are a media OS designed for rapid development of media & software for professional level developers & common users alike. On behalf of the community & developers continuing this incredible computer operating system we would like to invite you to consider our platform for future development from Blizzard Entertainment. Gaming plays a vital role in our marketing road map & would value a partnership with Blizzard to bring quality entertainment software to a new platform giving consumers more choices & you as a developer a chance to not only broaden your sales but possibly lower your development time & yield a faster "To Market Time", while reaching new technological heights & pushing your development process one step further to increase the level of innovation found in Blizzard software titles. As you know Gaming is a vital market in the home PC market. From Businessmen to children games are a large market as you well know & depend on for your livelihood. Our marketing road map requires a solid development relationship with 3rd party developers to further both ours & your reputation. This will give you the opportunity to find a new market in a thriving competitive home & professional operating system for both x86 & PPC architectures as well realizing the advanced API's capabilities & extremely low latency as the opportunity to push your games one step further "eeking" out more performance & incredible effects from hardware that could simply not perform the same under a competing platform. We offer you community & the realization people want a choice & this movement is becoming more clear with open source movements. We give you a well structured development platform with a solid, graceful, easy to use API allowing your development team more creative freedom to bring your projects to life & less time spend on debugging & error correction. I look forward to hearing back from you & sincerely hope you will consider us as a choice for your future projects. For technical & API documentation please go to http://bang.dhs.org/be/bebook.html Thank you for your time, Sincerely, Jess Tipton - Marketing Relations - jet@beosjournal.org http://www.yellowtab.com" What can the community do you may ask? Email me with developers that you feel should be contacted. There are many good 3rd party companies that can help further our efforts & with enough contact it will at least raise awareness for our future & current projects. Also any chance you get speaking to sales people in stores or any other situation where you can voice your needs & opinions as a consumer make it known you want choice. Write developers yourself & let them know you want to see their software for alternative OS platforms. Most current software titles game or other wise have feed back forms... use them. - Jess Tipton - jet@beosjournal.org