For quite some time the Nexuiz homepage has been hinting at a major announcement in March. Now the cat is out of the bag and hitting the community over the head.

Visitors to the new Nexuiz homepage will find, instead of the usual downloads, an ad for a new game. A link at the top of the page points to the Alientrap webpage for the original open source game. The nexuiz.com domain was meanwhile sold to IllFonic and the game will be sold commercially.

What many developers and Nexuiz enthusiasts were expecting to be an announcement for a new version ended up being a disappointment. The founder of the game, Lee Vermeulen, according to an open letter to the community and IllFonic, who stopped contributing to the project four years ago, sold the domain to the Colorado-based video game developer IllFonic. IllFonic wants to market Nexuiz as a commercial game on Playstations and other consoles. Apparently Vermeulen had asked a few developers if it were alright to use the code for commercial projects and that most agreed to it. However, he failed to tell them that the game was to be marketed under the same name, thereby virtually undermining the open source version.

A few members of the Nexuiz community thus addressed IllFonic and Vermeulen in an open letter with their concerns. They would like IllFonic to re-release the old homepage and market the commercial project under a different name. The complete letter and background details are on the Alientrap forum page.

For quite some time the Nexuiz homepage has been hinting at a major announcement in March. Now the cat is out of the bag and hitting the community over the head.