Nocturnal Media acquires West End Games

[Whill]

http://www.nocturnal-media.com/blog/2016/4/13/nocturnal-media-acquires-west-end-games

This doesn't really effect us directly, but I thought some of you may be interested in this. Although there is still an OGL Open D6, the new company can and likely will publish new D6 games.

And who know? If the company is successful maybe they will even eventually get the Star Wars RPG license some day and publish a new WEG Star Wars D6 RPG? Here's to wishing on a star!
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[cheshire]

I'd love to see WEG back in the hands of this system. I don't fancy most of the changes that Purgatory Publishing made to the system. But if they have a good head on their shoulders and they listen to fans about what makes the system good, then I'm modestly hopeful. Though really I don't find myself excited at the prospect of some sort of D6 resurgence. If they have a new D6 product I may take a look at it, but I won't support something just because it has the D6 label, like I probably would have done five years ago.
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[Whill]

[Treefrog]

OOC, how much longer does FFG have the rights to the SWRPG? Wouldn't it be great if the new WEG got SW back?

[garhkal]

Well, we can certainly hope they get the ok to re-start D6 Starwars.. Especialy with TFA, R1 and the other 2 films coming out!
Would be nice to see official stats for some of the new stuff..
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Whill]

[Sutehp]

[Treefrog]

[cheshire]

[Sutehp]

[cheshire]

A short version of the history is that it got bought by a holding company and then re-sold, along with all of its many properties, The D6 system, Masterbook, Junta, Shatterpoint, etc.

The buyer loved Junta and was primarily interested in that property. And whatever business savvy he might have had, balancing ownership of a game company wasn't really one of his primary skills. It's from this time that we got the D6 Space, D6 Adventure, D6 Fantasy, etc. And while hopes were initially high, there were some warning signs. Artists weren't getting paid in a timely fashion, and when the owner of WEG didn't reply, they'd eventually bring the matter to light in public forums. Also, the books were produced in such high quantity, that even though they sold a fair number of them, the warehousing fees were killing any profits they may have made. Eventually the move was made to pulp the excess books.

WEG went kind of dark for a while, and public response from the ownership was spotty. Planned books were halted. Then a new project came along and brought some hope back to the system. Pre-orders went out, and funding for the book was coming along. In fact, the book made it all the way to print, and was sitting on a boat on the shores in the US, waiting to go through customs. But there were a number of problems getting it to that point, and the matter came to a boiling point when it came to send a proof copy to the owner of the company. Fed up over the mounting arguments, the owner of the company said something to the effect of, "you can pulp the lot of them."

They did. An entire print run was destroyed. People eventually got their pre-order money back, but that was a journey in itself. The D6 community had lost what trust they had in the company, and more particularly the owner.

The owner made some attempt at getting some public trust back, and moving forward with a new business venture by releasing the system into an open model. The original idea was that there would be a website that you could customize rules and synthesize that into a game book that would be easy to run under the OGL, and get your own POD rulebook.

It actually was a pretty cool idea. There was some public chatter about it.

Then the owner turned into a recluse again. There wasn't any word about the product for over a year. So, the community continued talking about what it would like to see out of its own open system. That chatter came to codify itself into people wanting to run spin-off systems that were dissimilar enough to not run afoul of copyright issues. There is where systems like the Cinema6 system and the MiniSix came from.

The owner of WEG came out of hiding and was pretty upset to see that the community had started splintering off into niche interest groups and were developing their own systems based off of his plan. But he'd been out of touch for, iirc, over a year by that point.

He eventually opened up the system (which really was the best thing to do at that point), but wanted to hang on to WEG as a company. Effectively defunct, but still he wanted to hold on to the possibility that it could do something. Though that possibility didn't seem to be manifesting in much, as he even forgot to re-register the trademarks on the logos when they came due. I checked.

So, fast forward a few years, he seems to have sliced up the WEG properties and sold them off individually. Which, really probably was for the best.

Now we wait to see what Nocturnal Media is going to do with it. Whatever it is, it can't be any worse than what has happened to it.
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[cheshire]

TLDR version:

Someone bought the bankrupt company and did this with its name:



Edit:Oh hey, I didn't realize, that's my 4,000 post, I'm a Grand Admiral. YAAAY!
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Before we take any of this too seriously, just remember that in the middle episode a little rubber puppet moves a spaceship with his mind.

[Sutehp]

[Whill]