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Wizards owns SIX video game studios and other business of WotC
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8877102" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>Ummm, I think what you're trying to say is that the lost the licence to WarHAMMER, then created Warcraft, and that's sorta right, but not quite. The actual sequence of events, according to Blizzard, which has talked about this a fair bit in the last few years, with only slightly conflicting accounts is:</p><p></p><p>1) Blizzard started working on an RTS that was extremely heavily inspired by/beholden to Warhammer.</p><p></p><p>2) Blizzard attempted to get an official Warhammer Fantasy licence from GW. GW were extremely difficult to deal with, had a lot of conditions, and eventually negotiations broke down.* </p><p></p><p>3) Blizzard then just made Warcraft, which was "legally distinct" from Warhammer despite having originally been intended to be a Warhammer game. GW did come after them, at least according to some Blizzard versions of the story, but it seems like either GW gave up or it was resolved out of court.</p><p></p><p>So to be clear they never actually had the licence to lose.</p><p></p><p>*= This is unsurprising, because GW in the '90s and '00s were known for being spectacularly painful to work with, extremely demanding, and the studios that put out GW-licenced games in that era did so more because they could "manage" GW than because they had exceptional games or the like. A lot of this was because of the 1994 IPO and inept and greedy attempts to extract value from GW's IP, which calmed down a bit later on (though still flares up occasionally). In the very late '90s/early '00s GW for example managed to kill off both a massive, online Warhammer Fantasy battle game, and Warhammer Fantasy MMORPG, both quite far along in production. The battle game was basically an online version of WHFB, and they decided it would compete with tabletop, so stopped it (which I suspect was very short-sighted). With the MMORPG, rather unusually they were actually funding it in part (this is the only GW video game I'm aware of where they did this), and decided it was going to cost too much to market and release. Eventually Mythic got the licence, and made Warhammer: Age of Reckoning with both their own money, investors, and eventually Electronic Arts bought them and funded it. But GW had only agreed to five-year licence and chose not to renew it, killing off that was well!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8877102, member: 18"] Ummm, I think what you're trying to say is that the lost the licence to WarHAMMER, then created Warcraft, and that's sorta right, but not quite. The actual sequence of events, according to Blizzard, which has talked about this a fair bit in the last few years, with only slightly conflicting accounts is: 1) Blizzard started working on an RTS that was extremely heavily inspired by/beholden to Warhammer. 2) Blizzard attempted to get an official Warhammer Fantasy licence from GW. GW were extremely difficult to deal with, had a lot of conditions, and eventually negotiations broke down.* 3) Blizzard then just made Warcraft, which was "legally distinct" from Warhammer despite having originally been intended to be a Warhammer game. GW did come after them, at least according to some Blizzard versions of the story, but it seems like either GW gave up or it was resolved out of court. So to be clear they never actually had the licence to lose. *= This is unsurprising, because GW in the '90s and '00s were known for being spectacularly painful to work with, extremely demanding, and the studios that put out GW-licenced games in that era did so more because they could "manage" GW than because they had exceptional games or the like. A lot of this was because of the 1994 IPO and inept and greedy attempts to extract value from GW's IP, which calmed down a bit later on (though still flares up occasionally). In the very late '90s/early '00s GW for example managed to kill off both a massive, online Warhammer Fantasy battle game, and Warhammer Fantasy MMORPG, both quite far along in production. The battle game was basically an online version of WHFB, and they decided it would compete with tabletop, so stopped it (which I suspect was very short-sighted). With the MMORPG, rather unusually they were actually funding it in part (this is the only GW video game I'm aware of where they did this), and decided it was going to cost too much to market and release. Eventually Mythic got the licence, and made Warhammer: Age of Reckoning with both their own money, investors, and eventually Electronic Arts bought them and funded it. But GW had only agreed to five-year licence and chose not to renew it, killing off that was well! [/QUOTE]
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