Anurien
First Post
Some interesting news for you (and vendors of OGL/d20 character generators like myself).
While this is undoubtedly good news for RPGXplorer (and others) I would like to wish CMP a commisatorial pat on the back, because I can imagine all too well how this must hurt like hell.
From the CMP website:
While this is undoubtedly good news for RPGXplorer (and others) I would like to wish CMP a commisatorial pat on the back, because I can imagine all too well how this must hurt like hell.
From the CMP website:
Without preamble or holding anything back it's pretty simple:
Effective November 30th, we will no longer hold license with Wizards of the Coast to produce data sets of any kind for any program.
Wizards of the Coast has declined to extend our agreement, initially citing no reason. Then, after speaking with our contact at-length, we got this explanation: "Because of Future Product Considerations."
Whether this means 4th Edition is looming, they're doing things in house, or they've decided to give a license to someone else, we simply don't know.
What this means in simple terms is that as of December 1st there will be no Wizards of the Coast products available for sale from us. No data sets for e-Tools, PCGen or RPG Foundry. No Interactive Adventures or Atlases. No Fantasy Grounds Data Sets. Nothing. (And, yes, that does mean that all RPG Foundry data set pre-orders will be canceled and refunded.)
That does not mean that we're going out of business. We're not! This has no impact on our other publishers. We will still be producing data sets for them, and in fact we're working on adding a few other publishers to the list of those we do business with in order to bring even more data sets to you guys and gals.
This does, however, also mean no more e-Tools program sales. Which is not as big an issue as e-Tools was at the end of its life cycle, anyway. We had three new data sets for release this month, but that's not happening now as Wizards won't approve them at this stage. And we were basically done with e-Tools, anyhow.
So for a couple months we'll be producing and selling data sets for PCGen, only, until RPG Foundry is out.
But not all is "doom and gloom" around the Zoo! So here's the silver lining on those black clouds. We have (so far!):
Bastion Press and Zeitgeist Games have agreed to allow for our original RPG Foundry Data Swap. So for those products there will be a free data exchange option for RPG Foundry-format data sets from original e-Tools and/or PCGen purchases.
We're working on adding several other publishers to our list for PCGen and RPG Foundry data set creation, and not just for the D20 system! And things are looking good there. We can't say who at this time since negotiations are ongoing, of course, but we think people will be pleased.
In the next cycle of releases/updates (later this month) we’ll finally be revising our PCGen data sets to support PCGen Stable Production Release 5.10.1! Testing was finally concluded without any major changes (primarily to game modes settings since PCGen code changed a few things there - more details/comments at release time on this) and all is looking good.
We'll be continuing to sell Bastion Press product PDFs and we're working with a few of our other publisher partners to sell their PDFs as well.
And we've got a few other things "in the works" that we can't detail just yet... but when we can say more we will!
As a final note on data sets: The "2 years of support" will officially begin as of December 1, 2006, and end December 1, 2008. We'll still be doing updates, bug fixes, etc on both the e-Tools and PCGen data sets. That hasn't changed. You'll still be able to download the files that you've previously purchased (all data, the e-Tools Program itself, the Interactive Adventures and the Fantasy Grounds data sets) until that date.
I'm sure some of you are wondering by now if this is going to impact RPG Foundry in any way, so let's address that. Only slightly. Some of you may remember that we said we were basing our initial data sets for RPG Foundry by importing our PCGen files, since they were text and easier to manipulate. But it's still a monkey-ugly conversion with lots of work needing to be done to massage that data into RPG Foundry format, so we've been saying we weren't going to do any type of converter to release to folks because of those reasons. Well... we're revisiting that option given the new circumstances. We're looking at making a slightly higher-functioning converter (though it still won't ever be perfect) available that will at least get the data massaged in such a manner that it's usable in RPG Foundry from PCGen and e-Tools. When we do, we'll release it as a standalone, "alpha test," unsupported application for folks.
There isn't really much more to tell. Those are the highlights of things, as we can tell them to you.
No punches pulled, no lies, just the plain, painful truth. As much as we can tell, anyway, because of NDAs.
We're not going anywhere, we're not folding shop and running away, RPG Foundry isn't dead and neither are we.
So you're stuck with us Monkeys for a long time to come yet.
-The Code Monkey Publishing Team
