Senior Expert
Joined: Mar 2003
Posts: 5,377
USofA
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They want to know that their investment is safe, that you know what you are doing..
Remember Jetpack, Investors invest in teams and people, not software or hardware. Their investment is safe if the team can deliver in whatever engine you use. I'll always remember this from a VC meeting I had: "A good team can make profits out of a bad idea; a bad team will incur losses every with a good idea." Hence, even if the bad idea is 3DGS, a good team can make it work. Remember this next time you go to a pub. Try to sell the TEAM first, the GAME second, and then the game engine is mostly irrelevant.
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Have there been any commercially sucessful games "clicked together" with gamestudio, popular enough to win the confidence of someone who is going to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a game?
Of course not! Again, you are employing the wrong stratagy of playing to the bad PR. If the name is associated with bad games, you want to change the name. If people refer to the engine as "click together", you want a commercially successful click together game as a counterpoint.
So that instead of sticking to your guns and your ideals and your game, you are bending over backward for a publisher who has no interest in any of these!
Bottom Line: if you game looks and plays click together, then the Publisher is right to not invest in your team. But if your game looks and plays well, then the publisher is wrong to dismiss your team because it used 3DGS and 3DGS has that feature (independent of whether you used it or not).
BTW, this is how this exactly same arguement would play out on Torque:
Ejem....
"So garage-games. I love your Torque engine I really do but when I went to a publisher, they tried to get me to switch to Unreal becasue they knew that Torque has a reputation for having Starter Kits. I would love for you to change your name so that publishers wouldn't assciate my game with a Starter Kit game. I mean let's face it, every time I go up to someone and tell them I use the Torque engine, they look at me and ask "isn't that the one with the starter kits so all you have to do is tweak it to have a game?" and when I say yes, they look at my game like it's contaminated and say "OH".
Please garage-games, change the Torque name. I don't want my game to be associated with all the bad games that come from the Starter Kit"
Same problem. Different Engine.
And as for Take-Two wanting you to switch to Torque, this could be due to any number of reasons not having to do with 3DGS. Maybe the publisher is more familiar with that engine and thus is more comformatable using it. Maybe Mac's are a big demographic for the publisher. Maybe they are tired of people spending one month on a game engine and presenting it to them like it's the next GTA!!! 
Jetpack, if I may suggest a change in strategy? It's obvious that the name will not be changed; you knew that from the begining.  But the crux of this and other threads has NOTHING to do with the name or click-together... it has EVERYTHING to do with how to get a publishing deal. As such, might I recommend that you work that angle and start asking people with successful pub deals (Ichiro and Nardalus come to mind) how they got those deals with 3DGS? Isn't that really what we are after, not a name change but insight into how to get a pub. deal? 
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