ELEMENT! The 'master' of 'magic' games!

I signed it a long time ago (how did I miss this post)

Stardock actually tried to develop the sequel for MoM, but unfortunately I've read Atari caused a massive legal mess for Stardock when attempting to purchase the rights.   Stardock reportedly placed a financial offer of 6 digits, yet the Atari lawyers screwed it up with legal complications.

As a result the only company who can legal provide a sequel of  MoM  is Atari at this time.  Unfortunately Atari currently doesn't have a good reputation for releasing games, so any sequel would probably be a disgrace. 

Apparently Ubisoft also had some control of the license at one point, but they were willing to give it up.  Atari was the only one that wouldn't give up their micropose rights.

last two atari games I played were "Enter the matrix" and "transformers" (not the one based on the movie) and they were ok and AWESOME respectivly  (transformers was obviously kinda low budget, but the level design was solid and very pretty.  it had plenty of secrets and power ups.  The rag-doll effects were cheesy and the controls were kinda clunky, but it mady you feel like a giant robot storming around the forest or whatever.  It was a very solid and fun game)

So I'm not sure what bad reputation Atari has gotten itself (other than obviously being unwilling to give up the MoM rights to somebody with plans to actually do something with it, something over which I certainly thumb my nose, but... that isn't the point)

Why do corporate sinkwholes so over value 10+ year old names and never allow anyone to use them with out shelling out massive amounts of cash?  Master of Magic was a great game in its day but the amount of users now a days who have no clue about the game is going to be massive.  Each year that goes by im sure the value of MOM goes down due to the lack of games released under the name. 

And its us gamers who ultimatly suffer

Because most companies use cancer as their business model. Greed mean profit, profit means growth, growth mean more profit, etc. Very few ever realized that cancer inevitably results in the death of the host, and the cancer. (see recent "economic downturn" as cancer patient going on life support)