» Industry
Friday, August 22, 2008
Days of Wonder sells Battlelore to FFG
No, I’m not joking: Fantasy Flight Games has arranged to purchase BattleLore from Days of Wonder, including all copyrights and existing backstock, to become the game’s new publisher. BattleLore fans shouldn’t worry, as the transfer of ownership includes the recently announced Troll Map expansion, and BattleLore creator Richard Borg has agreed to continue developing support products. Probably a good fit at FFG, which obviously still didn’t think it had enough to do. (Full press release below)
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Thursday, August 21, 2008
More this just more even more in from Gen Con
A few links from Saturday’s shows.
- North Star Games has followed up their smash Wits and Wagers with Say Anything.
- Fat Dragon makes cardstock terrain, and even some out-and-out fold-up minis, on a really high level of craft.
- The Call of Duty real-time card game.
- I’m fairly certain Paul meant Batavia.
- How to Host a Dungeon sounds like a tabletop interactive version of the world-generation stuff at the start of indie PC text game Dwarf Fortress; everyone I know thinks that part of Dwarf Fortress is cool but stops playing as soon as they have to actually do anything. If HtHaD can actually make you a part of the cool stuff, that’s a recipe for success.
- I’ve been eyeing The Continuum with interest for a bit, but also with some suspicion; they have their fingers in so many pies that they smell a little bit of desperation. (Mmm, desperation pie.) But to be fair, I need to give the gameplay a look, and the another-free-booster-for-finishing-three-games thing is really smart.
All we’re gonna say about the McCain thing
…has been said better by Herculean RPG player and critic John Kim.
Edit: we should throw in a mention of this mildly amusing backpedal from the McCain campaign… which gets a little more amusing when you read that it predates the second anti-D&D slam. “Okay, nobody’s looking anymore… try it now!” Maybe someone should tell them that lots of D&D players are still who they were at the very beginning: Midwestern male armchair generals who distrust hippies.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Layoffs, restructuring at WotC
Today Wizards of the Coast announced it would be restructuring, in order to “focus on key growth strategies for core brands.” (see release below) As you’d expect, this means layoffs, though an exact number or any actual names hasn’t been revealed (ICv2 has heard the total is less than 5% of employees). I wonder how many of the layoffs are Gleemax related - it’d be a shame not to use that labor to get D&D Insider up to speed more quickly. As always, if anyone knows more, give us a holler.
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Friday, August 15, 2008
2008 ENnies winners announced at Gen Con Indy
Earlier this evening at Gen Con Indy, the winners of the Gen Con EN World RPG Awards 2008 were announced to all in attendance at the Indianapolis Westin Grand Ballroom (see full list below). Highlights include Paizo Publishing’s win for Fan Choice Best Publisher (Paizo generally dominated the categories, along with White Wolf and Green Ronin). Star Wars RPG: Saga Edition took Best Rules over second place Trail of Cthulhu, as well as Best Game, though it was edged out by Changeling: The Lost for Product of the Year. Lifetime Achievement Awards were also awarded, to Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, and Erick Wujcik. OgreCave extends a hearty congratulations to all of this year’s winners.
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Thursday, August 14, 2008
This just in from This Just In From Gen Con
The good news is, someone is actually bothering to report live from the show… where “live” is defined as “ways other than writing rambling daily reports that don’t go up until the next day.” The not-bad-but-maybe-weird news is that the reporting is being done in a podcast - a short one, but still, no random access and no Google juice - and while Tevis and Macklin are two of the best, they barely have time to get the thing up there, let alone do any show notes.
We’re here to help:
- Warmachine: Legends is the new Privateer offering, besides some more thorough teases on Monsterpocalypse. If you play WM, you know all about what Legends has to offer, aaaand it’s not super-apparent that there is anything in it of compelling interest to the outsider. They are selling a sweet beer-swilling trollkin figure inspired by the Ram brewery, though - watch for that to hit the online store.
- MAID RPG, the first ever Japanese RPG to be translated to English, is at the show. Its current website is temporary, but I have to say I’ll be a little heartbroken when it gets replaced.
- HELLAS: Worlds of Sun and Stone! Also known as, Not The Board Game! Ready for some Greek-empire-in-space action? Answers apart from “hell yes” are wrong answers.
- Crafty Games has sort-of-kind-of announced a release date for Fantasy Craft: “It’ll be done in the fall.”
- Fantasy Flight apparently has the largest booth at the show. We don’t have hard data on that, but hey, Paul Tevis has the most honest face on the radio. Reports of some big thing being lined up for at FFG today are tantalizing but inconclusive; Mutant Chronicles? Someone clue us in.
- Ken Hite’s redoubtable Out of the Box column has a new sponsor in Indie Press Revolution. It’ll be changing to a more blog-like format (huzzah!).
This would all be more helpful if game companies had the wherewithal to update their web sites and attend Gen Con at the same time. They still don’t. In the meantime, This Just In From Gen Con is doing a bang-up job.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Grey Ranks and Wolfgang Baur’s Open Design project tie for Diana Jones Award
MAKE THEM FIGHT FOR IT
Read all about it at Baur’s LJ. Diana Jones Award info here.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
WotC amends D&D4 GSL in soon-to-be-specified ways
One of the big complaints about the Game System License for D&D 4 has been the clause that says they can change it without notification; well, apparently they have every intention of at least getting word to people who read the web, and here’s us doing our part. Changes to the GSL, as yet unspecified but relating to third-party publisher feedback and fan-site policy, will be announced in the “very near future,” which presumably means a Gen Con announcement event (and its attendant website meltdown). One wonders if the fan-site-related aspects were necessitated by the suspension of development work on Gleemax, which was vaguely posited at one point as the intended home for fan-contributed material. (Like they could ever stuff that genie back in the bottle.)
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Reaper puts the lead back in leads
Not in all of them, granted - just the new P-65 Heavy Metal miniatures line. Apparently, real, honest-to-Orcus lead is perfectly legal in miniatures! That tidbit and a bunch of fascinating other ones are available on the linked FAQ. Kudos to Reaper for finding a way to turn economic necessity (the newly high cost of tin solder) into an excuse to take it back to the old school, a marketing move that core gamers always love.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Gleemax is one dead-ass brain-in-a-jar
“We’re not going to abandon the vision, but we are going to put large chunks of it on the backburner until we prove that we can succeed at the most important pieces. Those pieces are Magic Online and D&D Insider.” It’s a shame WotC doesn’t have the resources to execute on Gleemax right now, because the vision is pretty good. Someone could possibly beat them to it - maybe the BGG developers if they’re interested in developing for a more general community, but they probably aren’t, and anyway it’s unlikely that many others could get the industry behind one unified effort the way Wizards was trying to. The Gleemax forums, BTW, will be moving back to the Wizards URL they (largely) came from.
So what do y’all think - should I use some of my copious free time to hack up a social network? Or would any of you be interested in seeing some more social-ish features show up here on the Cave?
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Hârn creator passes away
A few days ago, the man who created the highly-detailed fantasy world of Hârn, N. Robin Crossby, passed away after a two year battle with cancer. Yesterday, Tom Dalgliesh of Columbia Games, the original publisher of Hârn, issued a statement (below) that highlights the importance of Crossby’s influence on the RPG setting. Crossby had been continuing to expand Hârn through Kelestia Publications. OgreCave wishes his family the best, and asks the world in general, “Can we stop losing great tabletop gaming names now, please?”
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Sunday, July 6, 2008
Yay, we’re all insiders! Or something
Dragon #364 is, for the moment at least, a free download. You do have to log in if you want to read articles as plain HTML, plus the links will go for-pay eventually, or else I’d link you straight to top-billed DMG author James Wyatt’s commentary on the design of that book, or the “Class Acts” article that adds two pages of the interesting wizardy stuff that should have been in the PHB. (Did y’all really need those two pages for something else that badly, WotC?) Oh, and the searchable rules database (aka D&D Compendium) is also free, for now. I wonder if taking these back behind a paywall eventually is gonna really backfire on Wizards - we have a bit of talk on that subject in the next Audio Report, but… yeah.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Mutant Chronicles CMG no longer random
The crunch collectible card games are continuing to feel may have contributed to Fantasy Flight’s recent decision to make its Mutant Chronicles CMG non-random. Having already changed their significant CCG lines to “living card games” (read: non-random sets), making the same sort of move for Mutant Chronicles could be an excellent preemptive move for FFG to avoid becoming part of the seemingly-inevitable CMG crunch - which some say is already upon us. Makes me wonder if the supposed “packaging problems” the company had just after GTS were really problems, or a product launch being thrown into a sharp turn before heading down a new path. (FFG announcement copied below)
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Monday, June 30, 2008
Free RPG Day 2009 announced
The date for next year’s Free RPG Day has been decided - June 20, 2009. As with any event of this scale, this year’s event had its strong points and not so strong points, as some of you have already mentioned. We’ll discuss our observations of this year’s event in our next OgreCave Audio Report.
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008
WizKids cuts everything but HeroClix and card models by year’s end?
So WizKids is moving its offices to Topps’ location in NY, “focusing” on just a few lines, and by year’s end, “aligning its staff with its product portfolio.” Uhh… good times. Rumors still abound that MechWarrior has life ahead of it, but you’ll note that it isn’t in the list included here. Maybe it’s moving somewhere. The funniest/saddest thing in the announcement from WK prez Lax Chandra below is the citation of “rumors of a 4th Pirates of the Caribbean movie” and its being “one of the most anticipated movies of all time.” As Jack Sparrow himself has said in a thousand Photoshopped LiveJournal icons: O RLY?
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Wednesday, May 28, 2008
CCG crunch continues with a vengeance
Couple of news bits coming hot-ish on the heels of the Upper Deck layoffs: Tenacious Games has folded - apparently The Spoils were too meager. Also, and this one’s a bit more surprising, the publisher of the former Fullmetal Alchemist and 24 CCGs has formally closed its game-publishing arm.
Maybe now, would-be new entrants into the CCG space will pause for a minute to rethink their business plans? Yeah, I know, never happen, but it’s a nice thought.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Wizards to attend Gen Con Indy 2008
The question on everyone’s mind, and making many folks nervous lately - will Wizards of the Coast attend Gen Con 2008 - has been answered, finally, with a resounding “yes”. As gamers and industry members hoped, the details seem to have been sorted out, and Wizards will indeed attend, and be a co-sponsor of, Gen Con’s 41st year this August. The press release (below) mentions that WotC will be “celebrating the newly released D&D 4th Edition by debuting the new Living Forgotten Realms campaign”, as well as enjoying the 20th anniversary of R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt stories. Now the question becomes, once the WotC events are finally posted for prereg (they’re promised later this week), will they fill instantly, or just crash the website entirely? Either way, this is great news for the show that hasn’t had much to smile about for a while. Update: the Gen Con schedule will be updated tomorrow. See the comments below for details. - ed
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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Roll the dice, win a lawsuit
Who says the small guy always loses? Apparently, Crystal Caste just won a lawsuit against Hasbro over a dice design patent. Michael Bowling of Crystal Caste was awarded $446,182 in royalties for Hasbro’s patent violation, caused by the game industry giant’s use of a die patented by Bowling in a version of Monopoly - do not pass go, do not use patented designs without permission. Couldn’t Hasbro afford to buy a few? Certainly buying in bulk would’ve resulted in a great deal.
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