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News Digest for the Week of October 1
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<blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 8413338" data-attributes="member: 6669048"><p>For a lot of IP, it'll go into the weird limbo area where nobody knows who owns what rights anymore because the companies just disappear. The ones with debt will declare bankruptcy and sometimes they'll get bought at auction by holding companies and sometimes they won't. Others just go out of business and you're left wondering if the rights transferred to the owner of the company or the creator of the game or some combination thereof. Made worse if it's a licensed property - I am still utterly shocked we got that reprint of the WEG Star Wars game a while back because that sort of thing never happens. It requires so many steps of approval between companies that all want their share of the money involved. Fantasy Flight is printing and distributing it so they want their share, Disney owns Star Wars so they want their share, whoever owns what's left of West End Games owns the actual text of the rules so they want their share, and figuring out how to make everybody happy is a Herculean task.</p><p></p><p>For others, it's still a crapshoot whether they'd get bought by somebody or not. If a company's not going bankrupt but simply closing before it gets that far (which is what it seems is happening with Dust based on the announcement), to sell the IP means they'd have to sell it for enough to cover not only any debt the company has but enough extra that it's worthwhile to the creators to sell IP they may want to come back to when the industry settles back down in a few years. Taking Fireside Games as an example, a larger company like Asmodee might want Castle Panic and offer to buy it from Fireside, but they'd have to offer Fireside enough to make it worth selling a popular franchise that, even if it's not profitable right this second, might be profitable in the future. Would Fireside want to gamble on that or just suspend operations and keep the company open as a holding company for the IP until 2025 or whenever it's clear the shipping and supply crises are over.</p><p></p><p>We've seen something similar already in RPGs with FASA Corporation. This is a simplified version of events (anything involving the rights to old FASA properties is always complicated), but around 2001, FASA Corporation stopped active operations and reorganized as a holding company for the rights to various game settings and other intellectual property. I'm not sure the specific reasons, but the tabletop gaming market was kind of screwy around that time. Magic: The Gathering dominated everything even after the CCG market otherwise collapsed, while D&D 3rd Edition and the OGL/D20 System Boom was well underway, already pushing other game systems off store shelves. They sold the rights to BattleTech and Shadowrun to WizKids, but they held onto Earthdawn. Earthdawn was then licensed to other companies in the 2000s rather than producing products directly, which allowed FASA Corporation itself to avoid getting caught up in the D20/OGL Bubble collapsing in the mid/late 2000s. So in 2012, after the market had mostly stabilized, FASA Corporation reorganized again and got back into publishing under the name FASA Games, Inc. eventually producing a new edition of Earthdawn in 2015.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Abstruse, post: 8413338, member: 6669048"] For a lot of IP, it'll go into the weird limbo area where nobody knows who owns what rights anymore because the companies just disappear. The ones with debt will declare bankruptcy and sometimes they'll get bought at auction by holding companies and sometimes they won't. Others just go out of business and you're left wondering if the rights transferred to the owner of the company or the creator of the game or some combination thereof. Made worse if it's a licensed property - I am still utterly shocked we got that reprint of the WEG Star Wars game a while back because that sort of thing never happens. It requires so many steps of approval between companies that all want their share of the money involved. Fantasy Flight is printing and distributing it so they want their share, Disney owns Star Wars so they want their share, whoever owns what's left of West End Games owns the actual text of the rules so they want their share, and figuring out how to make everybody happy is a Herculean task. For others, it's still a crapshoot whether they'd get bought by somebody or not. If a company's not going bankrupt but simply closing before it gets that far (which is what it seems is happening with Dust based on the announcement), to sell the IP means they'd have to sell it for enough to cover not only any debt the company has but enough extra that it's worthwhile to the creators to sell IP they may want to come back to when the industry settles back down in a few years. Taking Fireside Games as an example, a larger company like Asmodee might want Castle Panic and offer to buy it from Fireside, but they'd have to offer Fireside enough to make it worth selling a popular franchise that, even if it's not profitable right this second, might be profitable in the future. Would Fireside want to gamble on that or just suspend operations and keep the company open as a holding company for the IP until 2025 or whenever it's clear the shipping and supply crises are over. We've seen something similar already in RPGs with FASA Corporation. This is a simplified version of events (anything involving the rights to old FASA properties is always complicated), but around 2001, FASA Corporation stopped active operations and reorganized as a holding company for the rights to various game settings and other intellectual property. I'm not sure the specific reasons, but the tabletop gaming market was kind of screwy around that time. Magic: The Gathering dominated everything even after the CCG market otherwise collapsed, while D&D 3rd Edition and the OGL/D20 System Boom was well underway, already pushing other game systems off store shelves. They sold the rights to BattleTech and Shadowrun to WizKids, but they held onto Earthdawn. Earthdawn was then licensed to other companies in the 2000s rather than producing products directly, which allowed FASA Corporation itself to avoid getting caught up in the D20/OGL Bubble collapsing in the mid/late 2000s. So in 2012, after the market had mostly stabilized, FASA Corporation reorganized again and got back into publishing under the name FASA Games, Inc. eventually producing a new edition of Earthdawn in 2015. [/QUOTE]
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