Thursday, November 26, 2009
Grab 'em while you can!
Sometimes you just have to shake your head in disbelief at the stupidity and short-sightedness of some companies. Case in point: Games Workshop. Multi-million dollar exchange-listed behemoth tabletop games company.
They must have hired a new law firm or something, because gamers all over the world are receiving cease-and-desist letters from the suits to pull down from the net anything and everything that mentions their games. This morning, all the rules summaries and reference sheets I've done for their games were removed from BoardGameGeek, and I fully expect to get the email any day now that forces me to remove them from this site as well.
So I suggest, if you play any of these games, grab the sheets now while you still can.
Anyone with half a brain can't help but be amazed by this kind of treatment. How can any company be so stupid as to penalise their own fans; people who are putting countless hours of their own effort into advertising their product for free? I mean, really, how can having online rules summaries for twenty-year-old games like Curse of the Mummy's Tomb and Rogue Trooper hurt the company? Even if the game is still in print, it is common practice for companies to make their game rules available online. These games can't be played by rules alone.
I could go on from here into how this kind of customer-bashing has become de rigeur for companies all over the world, and how the knee-jerk response of companies to the internet is completely missing the obvious fact that they will actually end up selling more product if they allow the fans to promote and support it online. But we'd be here all day.
Suffice it to say that gamers know which way the wind is blowing, and are deserting Games Workshop in droves. Eventually the twelve-year-olds that these days make up their core customers will wake up to the facts as well, stop supporting this aging corporate beast of a company, and go elsewhere to game companies that actually care about their customers.
In the meantime, let's all watch Games Workshop dig its own grave.
The Games Workshop Files Purge of '09 (BoardgameGeek GeekList).