Perpetual Entertainment and they were a startup. They seemed to have a lot of good ideas and innovations about STO. They knew that it shouldn't have been a simple MMO, as compared to Cryptic forcing STO into their MMO mould. It looked to be heading in a promising direction, but they ran out of money and were forced to sell the property. Apparently they were also not developing fast enough to satisfy investors, but if you google some of the early STO stuff, you'll see some very interesting art. They just didn't have enough to show for it that they were actually making good progress. They were building a new engine, which is most likely the reason it was taking so long, but they were thinking it from the point of view of building a good Trek game and building a suitable engine for it rather than the other way around like Cryptic has done. The STO that we got was far less interesting than what we would have gotten with Perpetual, something that makes me bitter everytime I remember about it.
The problem was Perpetual WASN'T making ANY progress at all. In fours years with the property, all Perpetual produced was a few pages of concept art and 3 'test render frames' NOT done with their MMO engine and which even Perpetual admitted at the time - no consumer PC hardware could render.
Yes, they went bankrupt, but CBS was REALLY upset with the fact that after 4 years, basically nothing had been done, so, when CBS was shopping the property, one thing they told any interested developers was that said developer would HAVE to contractuallu accept a release date set by CBS; (because CBS didn't want a repeat of the Perpetual situation); and had to prove to CBS that they could make the date with a viable product.
That's what Cryptic wwent in knowing, and that's WHY the game was released when it was. From what I understand, there weren't to many development companies willing to acvcept all that, and of the 3 that attempted it; Cryptic was the one that had the best 'proof of concept' for CBS.
I alwasys lugh when people say "Pepetual would have done as awsome job", again, because in 4 years, they should havce been able to do more than some concept art and test renders. Plus, I'm sorry, but:
"Working your way up by starting as a crewman on an assigned ship doing day to day tasks"
may sound Star Trek, and there are a few fans who would love that level of detail; but I don't hink that type of game would have appealed to the larger audience of MMO players such a game has to attract and retain.
Perpetual was a sham company, hoping either for a miricle, or a way to embezzle any development money into the founders pockets before CBS got wise, imo.
