West End Games for Sale

[jdrakeh]

Going to such great lengths to criticize someone with whom you have no affiliation, for no apparent reason?

I think the reason for the criticism is very apparent. Eric Gibson solicited (and took) money for pre-orders on a product that he knew he could not afford to print and then did not return that money, going so far as to ignore specific email queries and forum posts on the issue for months on end while occassionally posting a "Everything is fine at West End Games!" reassurance (when everything was not, in fact, fine). It was, really, a case of gross mismanagement on par with the old Bucci shoe fiasco.

While I think that Dana stepped over the line with his criticism in some cases, said criticsm isn't entirely without merit -- Eric Gibson practiced some unquestionable deceit along the way, hoping that he could get his finances in order before it was discovered, and that nobody would ever be the wiser. Things didn't pan out that way. There is no question that Dana was overly agressive in that thread (IMO, anyhow), but there is also no question that Eric Gibson is not the blameless guy that he is trying to paint himself as.

 

[Urizen]

Hmm..

It's saddening, to see this happen.

I had heard a while back that D6 was opening up. I guess that's not the case now...

I wonder where the company would be now, had he chosen NOT to do a pre-order?

 

[jdrakeh]

I had heard a while back that D6 was opening up. I guess that's not the case now...

It might still be opening up, depending upon who buys it -- I wouldn't write that possibility off just yet.

I wonder where the company would be now, had he chosen NOT to do a pre-order?

Well, it presumeably wouldn't have the $5500 in debt owed to consumers but, OTOH, it still wouldn't be generating a profit (based on comments made by Eric Gibson that none of the products published by WEG under his tenure have ever generated profit). Further, since all of the pre-order money was apparently spent, it seems possible that, without the $5500 cash infusion, the company would have actually been worse off.*

That's over-simplifying things, of course. If Eric Gibson's posts concerning mortgages, palettes of unsold stock, and other issues are any indicator, there are literally dozens of different factors that would come into play -- many for the worse, I'm led to believe (when is being unable to take out a second mortgage on your home for fear of it initiating a divorce ever a good thing?).

*At least financially. PR-wise the failure to refund preorders (and to obscure the truth about the company's financial status from consumers while doing so) seems to have caused horrendous damage to WEG, the end resuls of which may not yet be clear.

 

[The_Universe]

Back when they had the Star Wars license, I was a WEG loyalist. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

I'll roll a d6 in your honor.

 

[kenobi65]

Back when they had the Star Wars license, I was a WEG loyalist. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

As you may recall from back then (probably 9 or 10 years ago now), the original incarnation of WEG died when the company's owner sunk all of his money (including WEG's profits) into his shoe-import business (truly!) With no cash to pay creditors (including their licensors, most notably Lucasfilm), they went belly-up.

IIRC, it took a year or so for them to reorganize as a new legal entity back then, and I don't think that they ever got back to the same scale that they'd had before.

I, too, loved the old d6 Star Wars; I even used d6 for my own fantasy RPG rules. I liked TORG's fluff, but the rules got to be very funky -- IME, it often wound up that you needed a truly tremendous success to beat a bad guy, so combats devolved into a long series of dice rolls, until you got a roll that "exploded" enough to give you that success, or drew just the right drama card.

 

[Hodag]

Very sad news

I have pretty much the entire WEG product line, with TORG being my favorite by far. I always loved the "Master" system and was never really crazy about the D6 rules (I converted WEG Star Wars to Master last time I ran it). The range that was published was awesome and the closure is causing the same kind of remorse I felt when GDW or FASA shut down. I hope that the IP gets some good homes and will return.

 

[Ranger REG]

I posted elsewhere that I was saddened to see things end up like this (though not entirely surprised). On the upside, this may be an opportunity for an established publisher (or group of publishers) to step in and give the D6 System and other WEG properties the kind of support that they have lacked since the mid-1990s. At any rate, here's hoping!

I nominate Kevin Sembieda and his Legal Team to take over West End Games.

 

[Ranger REG]

What exactly do you "get" if you buy WEG?

If you act now, they'll throw in a shoe company for free.

To be brutally honest, a RPG company that totally relies on product licensing is bound for closure. They're better off getting their own IP brand to sell or buy an IP outright for their own.

 

[Turjan]

To be brutally honest, a RPG company that totally relies on product licensing is bound for closure. They're better off getting their own IP brand to sell or buy an IP outright for their own.

WEG doesn't have anything licensed. They only use their own IP. I would also think that Junta is the most valuable one, as suggested further above.

One could argue that they didn't use their IP effectively. Somehow, d6 was always connected with Star Wars in people's minds. Trying to sell a system stripped of its popular license was an uphill battle, even more so when there were new games with the same license available, plus lots of cheap second hand WEG Star Wars books. I guess that a new version of Torg would have been a better idea than trying to sell three more or less generic versions of the d6 system.

Finally, the current owner of the WEG trademark has no relation to the former one.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Scooped! I promptly submitted this to Gaming Report, Circvs, ENWorld*, SJG, and Wikipedia around 0100 this morning. I missed the Wizards forums, though (I'm glad that somebody oposted it over there).

*I think I may have screwed up the News submission, though.

Doh!

I saw this post and as a result merged the two threads.

Of course, one was in General and one was in Publishers.

Doh!