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Ettin posted:There are a lot of folks who got banned from RPGnet and nursed a grudge for years, like long after the moderators have forgotten who they were. When Shannon Appelcline was researching the OSR for Designers & Dragons one guy he approached literally responded with "I've been waiting years for this!!" and chewed him out instead. I know at least one person has compared forum mods to their high school bullies, which is probably more revealing than they think it is.
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Jul 18, 2017 21:01
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Games Workshop is Being Sued For $62.5Mquote:The latest chapter in the house of Games Workshops’ legal troubles is here, as they are being sued for $62.5 million dollars amid 6 criminal complaints. Apparently the suit will cover GW stealing intellectual properties to bake into their own stuff (Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers into 40k), and dealing with GW's insane price gouging. quote:GW sells 1-inch-models like the ‘Imperial Space Marine’ for $30.00 retail online, requiring a ‘minimum’ of $10 Shipping. Stores contacted the V.P. of ‘Double-Grand’ (associate of GW’s Asian suppliers) and received a Confirmed quote of “3-cents-per-figure” for said 1-inch injection molded plastic figures. GW sells mass-produced plastic at 50,000-percent-mark-up! Its not a 100% markup for 6-cents, not a 1,000% for 60-cents – but 50,000% at $30.00!? Also this, which I think means the suit would force GW to run stores to...undo its bad rep? I'm not sure what it means. quote:An amount of 50,000,000.00 paid by GW to Stores to operate Stores/Trust to administer and oversee the fair and continued support or exchange of the public’s betrayed investments cited herein, to then convert to Public Domain in 10 years.
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Aug 8, 2017 15:40
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Evil Mastermind posted:Games Workshop is Being Sued For $62.5M I can't tell from the quotes precisely what sort of recompense they have in mind here - show up with a receipt for your last landspeeder and they hand you more plastic spacemen until you're holding enough product to represent a fair exchange for value according to some court established formula, probably. I can't speak to the merits of the suit overall, but that's the rationale behind the last bit. EDIT: I can say that while they may have a decent case for fraud or other illegal forms of profiteering, there's pretty much zero chance the price gouging thing is gonna fly. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Aug 8, 2017 |
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Aug 8, 2017 16:13
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Evil Mastermind posted:Games Workshop is Being Sued For $62.5M
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Aug 8, 2017 16:17
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dwarf74 posted:It's an absurd lawsuit where a game shop owner is representing himself and not doing a good job at it. It will get thrown out immediately.
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Aug 8, 2017 16:20
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Yeah the price gouging part alone is probably going to get it dismissed even if they have decent arguments for the rest.
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Aug 8, 2017 16:46
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dwarf74 posted:Unless I missed it - and my eyes honestly glazed over - I also have no idea how this guy would have standing to sue for GW's alleged theft of other peoples' (Heinlein, etc.) intellectual property. Warhammer Fantasy was rather blatantly ripping off Blizzard's Warcraft series though, so there's that. I'm kidding
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Aug 8, 2017 16:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:Warhammer Fantasy was rather blatantly ripping off Blizzard's Warcraft series though, so there's that. no that makes sense, go on
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Aug 8, 2017 16:57
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The suit reads like a Sovereign Citizen legal brief. Maybe he's a pain fetishist cause I suspect GW lawyers are going to stomp on his balls.
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Aug 8, 2017 16:58
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LongDarkNight posted:The suit reads like a Sovereign Citizen legal brief. Maybe he's a pain fetishist cause I suspect GW lawyers are going to stomp on his balls. The Sovereign Marines are huge dicks to work with: "is that Ancient holding a banner with gold fringe? He must be a Traitor!" *opens fire*
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Aug 8, 2017 17:02
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dwarf74 posted:Unless I missed it - and my eyes honestly glazed over - I also have no idea how this guy would have standing to sue for GW's alleged theft of other peoples' (Heinlein, etc.) intellectual property. EDIT: I 100% agree that this guy is a clown and the only way this isn't immediately dismissed is if the judge decides to teach the guy a lesson by letting GW's lawyers draw and quarter him. But the suit is not entirely without merit. Just mostly. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Aug 8, 2017 |
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Aug 8, 2017 17:15
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You left out the part where he goes "America is a place that loves the GLORIOUS FREE MARKET; Europe is a SOCIALIST HELLHOLE" in his complaint. Also, it's filled with spelling and grammar errors. He has a masters in law of some sort, or claims to, but he's pro se and can't help being a nut in his legal briefs, so this is going to go down in flames for him.
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Aug 8, 2017 17:33
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Yeah, you can really tell the guy is a crank. But even that line has a kernel of a real point. Smaller European based companies coming to the US (or vice versa) pretty regularly get in trouble for using practices legal on one side of the Atlantic and not the other. In the hands of someone who's not a whack job, evidence that GW isn't properly firewalling its operations to prevent this could really be a damaging line of attack. Where this could be interesting is if the guy has actual proof of some of his allegations to go along with being a crank. He still won't get anywhere with it, but a competent lawyer representing someone GW has previously sued for IP infringement could get some mileage off it.
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Aug 8, 2017 17:50
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He sounds like one of the mentally ill guys who basically lives at the public law library, when he's not living in a van, to do research for his comprehensive lawsuit against the entire federal government. Yes, this is a thing.
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Aug 8, 2017 18:37
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This lawsuit is an angry letter written by an illiterate moron, reformatted to superficially resemble a legal filing. No part of it will stand and nothing will come of it whatsoever.
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Aug 8, 2017 18:43
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Halloween Jack posted:He sounds like one of the mentally ill guys who basically lives at the public law library, when he's not living in a van, to do research for his comprehensive lawsuit against the entire federal government. Really, pseudo-law and sovereign citizen arglebargle is fascinating stuff. It's people who legitimately believe that the law is magic, and that uttering the proper incantation will force judges to comply with your demands. (What's terrible about it, of course, is that it tends to suck money from gullible and desperate people who are already in financial straits, and makes their situations worse.)
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Aug 8, 2017 18:51
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dwarf74 posted:There's not enough CAPITALIZATION, weird=uses (of) punctuation, red thumbprints, and commercial lien demands for that. The only real interest is that it's basically true that GW has been up to some stupid, and in some cases potentially shady, business practices. Not at the level of some kind of criminal case, but potentially damaging in PR terms and maybe even liability terms. This joker doesn't have standing for most of what he's alleging* but if he's got any kind of supporting evidence for parts of it, there are companies that would. EDIT: To clarify a point, the behaviors and practices he's describing don't really amount to what he says they do (i.e. fraud) but if true would still represent unfair practices that another company could potentially turn into a legitimate legal case. Similar pre-order shenanigans have gotten other distributors and stores smacked on the nose for example. *Interestingly the guy had at least enough awareness that the stolen IP arguments aren't something he's seeking damages for, as far as I can tell. Instead, he seems to be trying to set up an argument that GW can't claim development expenses/needs to justify their prices and practices because they just copied other IP to begin with, and also to establish a pattern of behavior. It's not a good argument, but it's at least a different one. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Aug 8, 2017 |
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Aug 8, 2017 19:12
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Are boardgames sufficiently different from books that the companies cannot (yet?) adopt the Print-on-Demand model for boardgames?
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Aug 9, 2017 06:35
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I imagine one of the biggest complications there is one of standardization. With books you can pretty reliably make size/paper/coloring templates with some variance for page count and then just run the machines when you need them. Board games introduce a lot more variables. Meeples/no meeples, die cutting, board/box size, etc. etc. that are going to make it dramatically harder for a POD model to take root, if it's even feasible in the slightest. More so when you think about how much of the board game market is driven by flashy product.
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Aug 9, 2017 06:45
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Yeah, that's the core issue. Print technology has improved to the point that individual books are functionally interchangeable; in the old days you had to set up the machines specific to each book so a copy of Moby Dick and a copy of Jane Eyre were distinct things. Now, they can be viewed as two of the same thing in regards to actually printing them. This changes the economies of scale drastically - even if you only sell one copy of your book, it gets clumped together with all the other POD books of the same basic template and thus can be part of a ten thousand book run and have a reasonable cost. But the variability of board game components means you have to tool up specifically for each game, and that set up cost is a flat amount that requires a certain minimum run to make at all reasonable. A copy of Settlers of Catan is not equivalent to a copy of Monopoly in production terms, and it's difficult to imagine how you'd get to a place where they would be.
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Aug 9, 2017 06:53
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gradenko_2000 posted:Are boardgames sufficiently different from books that the companies cannot (yet?) adopt the Print-on-Demand model for boardgames? FFG has experimented with using POD for minor game expansions, so long as they're entirely cards. There's a noticeable difference in quality, although the POD stuff isn't bad exactly, and it doesn't seem like they're moving to do any main line releases in that format.
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Aug 9, 2017 06:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:Are boardgames sufficiently different from books that the companies cannot (yet?) adopt the Print-on-Demand model for boardgames? https://www.thegamecrafter.com/ They've been doing it for a few years now.
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Aug 9, 2017 07:00
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Thegamecrafter there is doing about as well as we can hope for, but you're just choosing from an array of standardized pieces rather than creating custom bits for your own game. That's fine, and you can make a perfectly good game set with those choices, but us Ameritrash players love our carefully crafted custom components/cat toys. I didn't go deep enough into their site to see if they can do custom 3-D printing for a greater cost since there's basically no way it would end up being economical if you were trying to create a commercial product.
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Aug 9, 2017 10:03
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Tendales posted:FFG has experimented with using POD for minor game expansions, so long as they're entirely cards. There's a noticeable difference in quality, although the POD stuff isn't bad exactly, and it doesn't seem like they're moving to do any main line releases in that format. FFG also seemed to be inconsistent about how "on demand" this actually was - notably the Warhammer Quest expansions went "out of stock" almost immediately after release, and stayed that way until they lost the contract. (...So of course they're being scalped on ebay.)
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Aug 9, 2017 11:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:Warhammer Fantasy was rather blatantly ripping off Blizzard's Warcraft series though, so there's that. This is backwards. Warcraft was originally going to be set in the Old World and GW pulled out so Blizzard made it their own IP. Good work, GW
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Aug 10, 2017 00:53
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Lord_Hambrose posted:This is backwards. Warcraft was originally going to be set in the Old World and GW pulled out so Blizzard made it their own IP. That's, uh, the joke
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Aug 10, 2017 01:58
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Aug 10, 2017 02:20
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...I mean, it was even in the spoiler text.
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Aug 10, 2017 02:23
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Aug 10, 2017 03:47
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occamsnailfile posted:Thegamecrafter there is doing about as well as we can hope for, but you're just choosing from an array of standardized pieces rather than creating custom bits for your own game. That's fine, and you can make a perfectly good game set with those choices, but us Ameritrash players love our carefully crafted custom components/cat toys. People have done some ambitious stuff with The Game Crafter (and some go on to get picked up by publishers), but then there's also the stuff that made it into the recent The F Plus podcast episode.
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Aug 11, 2017 03:05
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In a very bizarre move, the german company ULISSES, or rather, their american subsidiary ULISSES NORTH AMERICA has made a deal with Games Workshop and will develop the next version of the Warhammer 40k roleplaying game called Warhammer 40k: Wrath & Glory.  Reference: http://www.ulisses-spiele.de/neuigkeiten/2017-08-11-ulisses-north-america-entwickelt-das-warhammer-40000-rollenspiel-wrath-and-glory/
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Aug 11, 2017 19:46
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Didn't GW or FFG just make new a new version of the 40K RPGs like last year?
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Aug 11, 2017 19:50
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Mr.Misfit posted:In a very bizarre move, the german company ULISSES, or rather, their american subsidiary ULISSES NORTH AMERICA I'm always sceptical when a foreign language company (even if they have an english language division) tries to move into the North America RPG market, because like it or not the NA market is very different from the Euro market or the Brazil market or even the Japan market.
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Aug 11, 2017 19:55
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Well, Ulisses has gotten The Dark Eye published stateside, and they were behind the very successful Torg: Eternity kickstarter.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:00
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Kwyndig posted:I'm always sceptical when a foreign language company (even if they have an english language division) tries to move into the North America RPG market, because like it or not the NA market is very different from the Euro market or the Brazil market or even the Japan market.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:05
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, Ulisses has gotten The Dark Eye published stateside, and they were behind the very successful Torg: Eternity kickstarter. Are these games any good?
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Aug 11, 2017 22:50
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S.J. posted:Are these games any good? Do you feel games have gone downhill since the 1990s?
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Aug 11, 2017 23:11
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S.J. posted:Are these games any good?
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Aug 12, 2017 00:05
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homullus posted:Do you feel games have gone downhill since the 1990s? Oh. Ohhhh.
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Aug 12, 2017 00:36
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Ross Watson is still headlining it, isn't he?
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Aug 12, 2017 02:33
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