Posts Tagged opinion

Wizards of the Coast zap piracy by.. er.. encouraging piracy

Posted by Rockjaw in Personal, Roleplaying on April 7th, 2009

In what I can only call a very odd coincidence, the very same day I published my post encouraging you to go download legitimate, reasonably priced PDFs of copyrighted Dungeons & Dragons source material, Wizards of the Coast have pulled all PDFs from sale. Not just old, out-of-print material; all Wizards of the Coast material, anywhere.

Why? Apparently, they’re trying to crack down on piracy. By, umm, cutting off people’s only legitimate way of buying these hard-to-find products.

I am, understandably, not the only one shaking my head here, not by a long shot. While arguably this move is aimed at cutting off the ‘ready-made supply’ for those who are spreading bought-PDF copies of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition all over the interwebs – and they have the lawsuit to show for it – it’s also had the knock-on effect of stopping anyone from legitimately owning vintage D&D material.

This shows a remarkable lack of understanding over at Wizards as to how the modern web works – indeed, how modern economics seem to work, at least from my chair.

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Rip van Rockjaw

Posted by Rockjaw in Gamey, Personal, Roleplaying on March 24th, 2009

A couple of years ago I worked with someone who was coming back into the (video) games industry after being out of it for over 10 years.

When I mean ‘out of it’, I mean it was like he’d lived in a cave for a decade. He hadn’t played key games; more than that, didn’t even know what they were.

It was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating to talk to him. Terrifying because he was in charge of some major product decisions; exhilarating because he came to everything with incredibly fresh eyes and intense new ideas. Needless to say he’s now blazing a trail somewhere.

I feel a little bit like that in relation to tabletop roleplaying today. Apart from the odd session here and there, almost always with an old system, I haven’t been properly aware of or up-to-date with the roleplaying industry since… probably 1994, when I was finishing university.

Since then I’ve seen things peripherally – like Dungeons & Dragons losing the ‘Advanced’ tag, like Games Workshop finally admitting it doesn’t do RPGs anymore, and sending their properties elsewhere (twice). I’ve also attended enough games shows in the last four years that I’ve seen some of what’s been played.

What I didn’t see (because I had no real reason to look) was the seeming re-invention of roleplaying as a hobby, rather than an industry – thanks to the Internet. It’s easy to joke about (“Nerds on the Internet? No way!”) but it’s obvious to me that the Internet is now allowing roleplaying to become what its fans want, rather than what some giant toy or games conglomerate decides it should be.

Which is damn cool.

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Variety gives me a gazil – okay, four more thoughts on Gazillion

Posted by Rockjaw in Links of Others, MMO-related, Press on March 19th, 2009

While most of the gaming press pretty much shrugged and moved on regarding Gazillion (or in the case of some blogs, sneered – but hey, that’s what blogs usually do) Ben Fritz at Variety* did that crazy ‘journalism’ thing and got the right people on the phone to comment.

In the process, he discovered a whole bunch of new facts which are very interesting, and led me to some more thoughts. You absolutely should read the article, but I’ll pull out some corkers here:

1. Gazillion has eight ‘projects’ in the works.

Four we know about (LEGO Universe, Marvel Super Hero Squad, Marvel Universe, Slipgate Ironworks’ MMO) but that leaves four more they’re keeping under wraps. That’s pretty huge. Again to give you context, while at NCsoft there were usually half-a-dozen or more MMO projects in various stages of development in Korea, it was rare any of them were made public.

Right now, again by comparison, NCsoft has four MMOs in development that you know about (Guild Wars 2, Aion: The Tower of Eternity, Carbine Studios’ MMO, Blade & Soul) but I guarantee you more are under wraps.

Still, of those projects you’re aware of, some have been in development since 2005, and hey, you’ve known about others since 2006. With Gazillion’s announcement and lots of speculation that they’re releasing Marvel Super Hero Squad in 2010, they’re already ahead of the game. I have a sneaking suspicion other publishers may try to follow this ‘late breaking’ approach in future.

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Predicting 2009

Posted by Rockjaw in MMO-related, Personal on January 3rd, 2009

“Welcome… to the world of tomorrow!!”

Ahem. So, a few things will definitely happen in 2009, like the sun completing another orbit around our planet, Obama being sworn in as President of the US and me writing this post. Well, all of them should happen at least. But what about the other stuff? What about… the unforeseen future??

Let’s make some wild predictions and see how we do, eh?

Before you rush off to the bookies, by the way, these predictions are entirely guesswork on my part. Possibly educated guesswork, but not insider-trading style guesswork. Honest. Read the rest of this entry »

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Goodbye 2008

Posted by Rockjaw in Personal on December 31st, 2008

… and good riddance?

I thought of sticking that in the headline, but I’m not so sure. For one glaringly obvious reason, 2008 won’t go down as a banner year for me; but then, I did a lot of good stuff too. Let’s look back. Cue the wavey flashback lines… Read the rest of this entry »

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