CGL Speculation #7 Options

[Method]

Once again, please try to stay on topic. Also, please review the ToS and post appropriately. Thanks!

CGL Speculation #1
CGL Speculation #2
CGL Speculation #3
CGL Specularion #4
CGL Speculation #5
CGL Speculation #6

[nylanfs]

I speculate that Tiger's belly ring will be a polished Hemite tomorrow.

[Crusader3025]

Mmmmm Tiger's belly ring. One the highlights of last year's GenCon for me. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[Pepsi Jedi]

Highlight of this running thread for me!

[The Dragon Girl]

..Tell me more about this belly ring

[Cthulhudreams]

I don't see commenting on the product roadmap as particularly bad or anything - It's a routine part of most technology industries - including comenting on the non-public version of the same roadmaps.

I was actually very surprised in the CGL #6 thread when someone said that commenting on the non-public roadmap was bad, I think of it as good, as it informs customers/re-sellers (i.e. DMs) about what is going to happen next for their game.

[Grinder]

I speculate that Tiger's belly ring will be a polished Hemite tomorrow.

First post in this thread and it has to be off-topic? Not cool.

[Cain]

I'll repost what I said in the other thread:

" Here's the point that Doc keeps missing.

We at Dumpshock have a huge influence on the way Shadowrun goes. Most (all?) of the 4.0-4.5 changes were things we bitched about here on Dumpshock. I know that some of my personal battles with Synner and some of the other CGL employees led directly to new errata being released. I also know that Dumpshock claims over 11,000 members. Assuming that less than half of them still posts, knows about the situation, and agrees to boycott CGL, that's still 5,000 books that didn't get bought. Even with a large print run, that's a huge number of books to have sitting in a warehouse."

Dumpshock may not be the majority of Shadowrun fans, bubt it is a significant percentage of them. Any company that has Shadowrun and ignores Dumpshock does so at their peril.

[Grinder]

That assumes that hardcore SR fans like active posters at dumpshock don't already have bought every SR4 book. I mean, how many of us actually pre-order? It's not like a boycott by 5,000 people means that the same number of every sourcebook is sold less.

[Pepsi Jedi]

That assumes that hardcore SR fans like active posters at dumpshock don't already have bought every SR4 book. I mean, how many of us actually pre-order? It's not like a boycott by 5,000 people means that the same number of every sourcebook is sold less.

Well I collect rpgs, but yes. I tend to buy alot of the books. In the few weeks that I've gotten back into Shadowrun I've bought about 8 of the 12 published books for SR4, and those I don't have in hard copy I got cheaper on PDF ((That bundle pack is an awesome deal)).

I have actually bought PDF's of the hardcopy books I liked to have on my Ipad. So I've double bought many of the books. (( Hard and PDF copies)) of those I don't have hard copy yet, I plan on buying as the pay checks come along.

So while the thought of "Not everyone sitting at the table buys every book" is quite right.

There are also people like myself, that buy not only one copy but two copies if not more. I'm not foolish enough to think it evens out. For 5 people around the table. 2 people might be the book buyers, with the others having the core book and a book or two else (( usually their favrite 'thing' books. Arsenel. Augmentation. Unwired. Street magic. which ever they like to play most)) So even with me buying two or three copies... that's not 5 copies of each book out there.

Still discounting your consumers, no matter how small the number is a bad idea. if 5,000 buyers stopped buying books. They would very very much feel it.

[Cthulhudreams]

To be honest, none of this matters - 5000 buyers either way isn't going to effect what Topps does with the license. Topps is unlikely to give the license to someone who has (as tiger eyes clearly stated) attempted (or actually as has been stated by some of the whistleblowers) defrauded them of royalties.

Seriously, LMR is not going to get the license again - it's just not plausible if any of the fraud claims check out that Topps will continue to partner with LMR/Catalyst to exploit the SR property. Topps only gets value where it gets the loyalty checks, and if LMR have defrauded them, or attempted to defraud them of said loyalties, as long as the fraudsters are in place (Coleman and those that have attempted to keep him in that position), the license will not be renewed.

Without that LMR will be wound up.

[Cain]

That assumes that hardcore SR fans like active posters at dumpshock don't already have bought every SR4 book. I mean, how many of us actually pre-order? It's not like a boycott by 5,000 people means that the same number of every sourcebook is sold less.

I haven't bought a Shadowrun book in months, although initially it was for a different reason. There's other ways of getting the material, such as borrowing a friend's copy, or just doing without.

[Bull]

Well, there's 11,000 registered members. But that's a deceiving number. There's a LOT of spam accounts, bot accounts, etc mixed in there.

This is also a membership roster that's 8 years old. There are probably quite a few accounts that haven't even logged in to DS in the last few years.

Honestly, at a very loose guess I'd say there are less than 1000 members that have logged into DS in the last year (Not counting spam bots). THere are only a couple hundred accounts that have any real activity to them.

Might be an interesting exercise to have Redjack work up an activity report and see what our active userbase looks like. Of course, considering the amount on crap the Mods are dealing with right now behind the scenes with all the bickering among a small handful of users and the absolute spamming of the Report feature that seems to be in vogue these days, I imagine they have precious little time to do much of anything here on DS.

And, to bring it back on topic to Cain's estimate... I think that Dumpshock might be able to influence about 1/10 the sales you figured. Maybe 500. And that's assuming everyone agreed with the boycott.

Bull

[Korwin]

All hail the Cult of Frank:

Here's the short version of the Shadowrun Situation:

Loren L. Coleman (the Battletech author, not the Cryptozoologist), is the majority shareholder of InMediaRes LLC. There are approximately 16 minority shareholders, a tally which is in no small part "approximate" because there have been at least two pieces of shadiness involving Mr. Coleman unilaterally transferring ownership of other people's stock. Over the last three years, Mr. Coleman has been making more and more unauthorized draws on the corporate accounts. While doing so, he has had a mansion built for himself in a gated community in Snohomish, Washington. This construction project was paid for not only out of his own pocket, but also by contractors that were billed directly to the corporation as freelancers.

During this period, IMR has been subcontracting for books to be translated and published in German, French, and Japanese with Pegasus, Black Book Editions, and ArcLight respectively. These companies have turned royalties in to Mr. Coleman and he has voluntarily declined to ship the royalties up the chain to Topps. This is a continuation of a practice engaged in by FASA where the foreign royalties would simply be lost and not distributed. However, in this case it is directly demonstrable that malicious intent was held - in that Mr. Coleman directed his book keeper to leave foreign royalties unreported on the grounds that Topps "didn't care about them anyway."

Also during this period, the reported income from conventions and direct sales has mysteriously fallen from nearly forty thousand dollars a year to less than six. This comes from Coleman selling things for cash and then simply pocketing the money rather than reporting it as corporate income. This means directly that royalties were not paid on those materials either.

Even after the real estate collapse, Mr. Coleman's house was appraised at a value of approximately $650,000. Over the last few years, he has consistently told creditors and investors that finances were much tighter than such extravagant expenses would indicate. Many creditors were not paid at all. And by "creditors" I don't just mean printers and advertisers and other "corporate" creditors, or even simply financial creditors such as the investors and poor suckers who made personal loans to IMR or Coleman directly - I include the actual creative staff. There are seriously Battletech writers whose checks are three years late, and given current financial problems may never be paid at all. Coleman's draws on company funds were so fast and heavy that some checks he wrote to writing and artistic staff actually bounced. My own personal checks were months late, and short by about a hundred dollars. And that was years ago (my last check actually arrived in 2008, though of course I stopped being a Freelancer there in September of 2007).

As this situation has boiled to a head, smaller and more agile companies have already divested themselves of connections with IMR and Mr. Coleman. Posthuman Studios (Eclipse Phase), and WildFire (CthulhuTech) have both cut themselves loose. WildFire has been quite public with the terms they have agreed to on splitting from Mr. Coleman, and he has broken those agreements twice. Three times if you include the fact that he didn't pay them their royalties in the first place. The first splitting agreement was that IMR couldn't make any new books, but they would sell off the remaining stock that said "Catalyst" on it and use some of the money to pay the owed royalties to WildFire. Coleman kept selling the books, but didn't pay the royalties. Then they made a new agreement where IMR had to give WildFire their remaining Cthulhutech stocks and that would count towards the royalties debts. However, when they opened those boxes, the books were still tens of thousands of dollars short of what was still owed. WildFire has now pressed for Chapter 7 against IMR.

Other creditors may yet follow suit. Topps is pressing for an audit of IMR and Mr. Coleman's funds. The things they will find in that are... less than hopeful. IMR's Payables are currently much larger than their Receivables. Years of not paying corporate debts while the primary shareholder milks the company dry has left them in arrears to everyone they've had any contact with. And the books are literally unauditable. So much stuff has been rewritten or simply never written down at all that making sense of it would be a Herculean task of its own. There is no sales data - it's seriously just a list of money in and money out.

Meanwhile, the company has been hemorrhaging employees left and right. Some of them have been straight up asked to falsify financial documents or quit, while others have simply seen the writing on the wall and fled like rats on a sinking ship. Most hilariously, a good amount of corporate property has actually gone with the employees, since the employees often went and got equipment on their own to be "reimbursed" later on - reimbursements that likely as not never came. Most hilariously, the shipping computer left with the employee who used it.

Mr. Coleman has been paying debts only when forced, and even then those debts have been paid late and often short. The only reason that any freelancers got paid in the recent days was because they were withholding copyright on books that they had been owed monies on for some time and which were in turn scheduled to sell for more in the remaining weeks than their own contracts. Nevertheless, a lot of high quality talent, and even medium quality talent, has stated that come hell or high water, they will never work with IMR again.

So in all of this, you may ask three simple questions: Who are the bad guys in all of this? Does Shadowrun have a future? And of course: What about all those books we were promised?

The Bad Guys: It's tempting to get very angry at the people who rant on message boards defending the indefensible. Complete assholes like Bull and Doctor Funkenstein are certainly not helping anything, and their allegiances and blatant lack of ethics will doubtless be remembered long after this saga is over. But don't fool yourself: their antics aren't unexpected or particularly relevant. You can get 20% of the people to approve of whoever happens to be in charge no matter what they do. The bad guys are still Loren L Coleman, Randall Bills, and Jason Hardy.

Loren Coleman of course is the man who proximally stole all the money. He is the center of the web of lies. It is he who demanded and received total control of the piggy bank and then sucked it dry while no one was looking. He's also trying to steal the company from the other investors. His legal defense is seriously that it only counts as embezzlement if he isn't the only owner, and that despite the fact that he took money from all his investors in exchange for partial ownership, and he has been sending them tax forms every year, that 3 to 4 years later he still hasn't gotten around to filing the forms properly to indicate that they actually own anything. So his defense against the charge of embezzlement is... interstate mail fraud. I can't even make this stuff up.

Randall Bills is Loren's best friend. And he is one of Loren's closest allies. It was he who told the book keeper that if she didn't want to follow Loren's instructions to help defraud investors and license owners and the IRS that she could quit. And he said that he was "The Messiah of Battletech" without whose blessing the franchise would collapse. He also said that he would drive the company into the ground rather than jeopardize his friendship with Loren. And he has lied to people and done everything in his power to resist efforts to remove Loren from power or the cookie jar of finances. Currently, he has his wife doing the shipping to cover for the employees who left in disgust or were forced out for lack of loyalty.

Jason Hardy is the current Developer of Shadowrun. He was appointed for loyalty to Randall Bills rather than knowledge of Shadowrun or writing ability. He has continued that tradition by pushing writers out of the pool for showing insufficient loyalty to the company, regardless of knowledge of the subject, writing ability, or loyalty to the Shadowrun line. When the scandal broke, he locked arms with Randall and told him that people were spreading lies about him. I am not sure if he actually believes this to all be some sort of wacky misunderstanding, but in a sense it doesn't matter. What he is doing is pushing low quality products as part of a deliberate and very petty attempt to push through a published versions of books without the work done by people who refused to work with Loren. Heck, at this point there are a number of people who straight up will not work with Jason Hardy. The Trees thing even more than the whole "maliciously cutting people who aren't supporting thieves from the loop" thing.

So... what does that mean for Shadowrun? It means that Topps is going to award the license to someone else, and everyone who ranted about the Cult of Frank or whatever is going to get to like the taste of crow. Unfortunately, new books have a 90 day development cycle even when people aren't struggling to find their way or picking themselves through a mine field of traitors or whatever. So it's very possible that the new company is going to miss GenCon, and not get a new product out until Christmas. That will be a shame. But it's still avoidable if Topps picks a successor early enough.

What about the books that were coming out any moment now? Don't hold your breath. First of all, a bunch of the books in the pipeline are, as currently set up, very bad. War!, Corp Guide, and Attitude are under current formulation basically wastes of paper. They need rewrites, and even reconcepting. And that just isn't going to happen without a new company coming in and purging all the Coleman loyalists (which they should be doing anyway). Randall Bills has promised a street date for the Limited Edition SR4A book of May 3rd, and those books are physically real items. But of course, he promised several other dates in the past and never delivered. He has his wife doing the shipping, and Troy left with his computer. So... it's anyone's guess how long it would take for books to actually reach anyone in particular. And of course, any books that aren't properly shipped by the time they lose the license are going to be hidden in a drawer and sold on e-bay on the down low to try to pay Loren's court costs.

-Frank

from here

[Bull]

Wow. I don't even know half the behind the scenes details, but I can pick out a handful of just out and out falsehoods there stated as fact.

YOu gotta admire Frank's dedication to his cause here. THe boy spends way, way, waaaayyy too much time writing and rewriting his same flawed argument (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[crizh]

Care to point them out?

It might be handy to get a bit of perspective on this whole thing.

[Fuchs]

Seconded. If there's something wrong in the post, please state what.

[Bull]

Care to point them out?

It might be handy to get a bit of perspective on this whole thing.

There's been 6 previous threads, and plenty of things have been pointed out. And then often ignored.

Frank's not entirely wrong on a lot of points. But he's making a lot of assumptions, and his POV has at least as much Spin as any of CGL's press releases.

It's not worth the hassle to argue this anymore, IMO. We'll know for sure whats happening with the license in a couple weeks. I personally don't think the license is going anywhere.

Bull

[Korwin]

I personally don't think the license is going anywhere.

Bull

If only a fraction is true (from Franks post), I dont see how the license can be staying where it is...

[dirkformica]

Care to point them out?

It might be handy to get a bit of perspective on this whole thing.

Agreed. We've seen a lot of point by point rebuttals in the various threads. I've really enjoyed those and been educated as a result. I'd like to see some here as well.

edit: Another reason I'd like to see this is because this is a new thread. The old threads were often closed because they were long and meandering. To start off a new thread with recapping of facts from multiple sides with their points and rebuttals would be MUCH more beneficial than the useless, misogynistic derailments that started this thread.

[Gormenghast]

Wow. I don't even know half the behind the scenes details, but I can pick out a handful of just out and out falsehoods there stated as fact.

YOu gotta admire Frank's dedication to his cause here. THe boy spends way, way, waaaayyy too much time writing and rewriting his same flawed argument (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

I, too, would be interested in seeing the specific flaws that you have picked out of the aforementioned post. You don't need to bother listing off all of the potential flaws and ambiguous wording if you're feeling fatigued with the discussion, but I am sure that these 'out and out flaws' that come so readily to mind would be easy enough to point out for the benefit of all of us.
Thanks!

This post has been edited by Gormenghast: Apr 27 2010, 09:58 AM

[Delta]

Frank's not entirely wrong on a lot of points. But he's making a lot of assumptions, and his POV has at least as much Spin as any of CGL's press releases.

That is my main problem with Frank and his "Cult". I can see it looks like CGL is going down, and judging from what I know, I won't be too sad about it (even if I don't think CGL actually keeping the license doesn't necessarily need to spell doom for the whole line), but what I take issue with is this whole "we're just advocates of the truth, and you're a bunch of evil spin doctors!"-attitude I see with a lot of the most outspoken critics, which is nothing more than hypocrisy in my opinion.

[Fuchs]

There's been 6 previous threads, and plenty of things have been pointed out. And then often ignored.

Frank's not entirely wrong on a lot of points. But he's making a lot of assumptions, and his POV has at least as much Spin as any of CGL's press releases.

It's not worth the hassle to argue this anymore, IMO. We'll know for sure whats happening with the license in a couple weeks. I personally don't think the license is going anywhere.

Bull

If it's so easy to spot the "out and out falsehoods", as you claimed, please post them.

[Bull]

1) At least half of his assumptions of motive are wrong, especially the ones surrounding Jason Hardy. Most of the rest may be wrong, but I don't interact enough with Randall to judge those properly.

2) QUite a few of his Plurals should be singlulars.

3) A lot of his facts are, as I said, assumptions that he presents as fact. Which makes it a falsehood.

4) I'd be willing to bet that Topps doesn't give a devil rats ass about Shadowrun or Battletech. All they want is paid. If that happens, CGL gets the license back. (And that's how you present something as an assumption rather than a fact. Becuase I don't know for certain. Neitehr does anyone else except for Topps and CGL)

Bull

[Fuchs]

1) At least half of his assumptions of motive are wrong, especially the ones surrounding Jason Hardy. Most of the rest may be wrong, but I don't interact enough with Randall to judge those properly.

2) QUite a few of his Plurals should be singlulars.

3) A lot of his facts are, as I said, assumptions that he presents as fact. Which makes it a falsehood.

4) I'd be willing to bet that Topps doesn't give a devil rats ass about Shadowrun or Battletech. All they want is paid. If that happens, CGL gets the license back. (And that's how you present something as an assumption rather than a fact. Becuase I don't know for certain. Neitehr does anyone else except for Topps and CGL)

Bull

1. You don't know what Jason's motives are. Only Jason knows that. One can just try to deduce his motives from his actions, like a judge does.

2. Which ones?

3. Which ones?

4. That depends on whether or not the accusations that Coleman (and with him, CGL) did shorten Topps on license payments due them are true.