Geasa The First Week - What I've learned

It's been a little over a week that Geasa has been on the market.

The sales have been surprising for me. Mainly because when we put out Mile High Dragon to say that it was met with very little fanfare, or anything remotely considered to be a single ticker tape made me uncertain as to what might happen.

Well, Geasa was a very pleasant surprise. For the first week, the sales at Drivethru have been pretty good. We've got 18 total sold of the full book and 23 total downloaded (from review copies, that means 5 people who are on the drivethru review list have it. We'll see where it goes from there).

What's doubly surprising is the amount of people who downloaded the free version of the game. The free version has gotten 337 total downloads. These are numbers that I certainly couldn't have dreamed to match with any product ever. That's a lot, and if I can convert even a 1% of these people, that's 3 sales I wouldn't have gotten without a free product. Hell, maybe someone will take the rules and make their own game with it. I'm already trying to think of how to do that with a game called Teenage Wasteland. I'll jot some ideas down, but that game is going to have to wait until I'm done with CyberGen 3.0.

This also tells me that .pdfs are doing fine and dandy thank you very much. I barely cracked the top 10 of the "sales of the month" category before I dropped quickly out of those rankings to be replaced by others. However, when that happens with only 16 sales, you know that there is a lot of people buying electronic formats to the games.

Also, it blows my mind that people would put any type of DRM on their electronic documents. Quick, I want people to be able to access the game as quickly as possible, let's put something that will slow them from enjoying the product. BRILLIANT IDEA!

A question about the future - Faery Curses

I've been thinking about stuff and how to publish things in this new age where the old models for everything are slowly dying around us. How I might want to do things differently.

There is a new method of doing things, which is through the ransom model which has worked well for Arc Dream publishing. There is the Creative Commons License, which I think is gaining more and more steam and rightfully so. There is even the old stick my head in the sand method and hope I luck out. However, with our latest experiment not working out the way we thought it would the last idea seems to be the worst of that lot.

Now, I do have Feary Curses (it has a new name, but I'm sticking with the working title because that's how I've talked about it here, but for the record I seem to be going with Geasa) and I was thinking what would happen if we just released the text as Creative Commons by-nc-nd license.

My question, to the three people who read this blog and anyone else who might stumble upon this. What should I do? Should I use the by-nc-nd license, or should I make it a less restrictive CC license. Should I give the older method a good ol' college try again. Do I take a page from Arc Dream and try the Ransom method.

Thoughts?

Upper deck ... Hey Hey Hey! Goodbye!

That's the old chant in many a hockey arena when a team is about to get elimintated from the playoffs.

Why reference it? Apparently Upper Deck, those who used to purvey lots of hockey cards as well as games such as Yu-gi-oh and Vs, has apparently been packaging up cards outside of the license with Yu-gi-oh and were selling them out the back door.

Konami sued them good, as you would if you owned the Yu-gi-oh franchise, and Upper Deck tried to counter sue and all that.

Apparently all the judgements are in and the judge has ruled in favour of Konami in every single instance.

Quoting the report from the New York Post we see that a bunch of execs,

Instead, five Upper Deck execs involved in the alleged fakes -- including Chief Executive Richard McWilliams -- have resisted being deposed, citing their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

Upper deck was trying their best to say that they had an approval clause in their letter of intent to Konami, but the Judge, Judge Valerie Baker Fairbank has ruled the following:

For the reasons asserted in Plaintiffs’ Motion papers, the “Approval” clause is not
ambiguous, and applies to advertising, promotional materials, and promotional activity. Exhibit C to the LOI provides illustrative examples, and though not an exhaustive list, reveals that a reasonable interpretation of the ʺApprovalʺ clause of the LOI would not include reproduction of unauthentic YGO.


They've got a lot of the court documents and other information here. This one is hilarious because it's got Konami's facts and UD trying their best to object to them.

Seriously? I think this is hilarious. UD used to be considered one of the big players in the game industry. They had the rights to Yu-Gi-Oh, which is really a license to print money, and had the only super heroes game that had the rights to both DC and Marvel in their VS game. Only to lose pretty much everything including MLB's licensing.

There have been a lot of grumbling that UD has always had a string of unethical business practices such as reprinting lots of wanted cards for individual executives who were able to use them for personal gain.

[H/T to Duk at Big League Stew]