Catalyst Games Ltd : was passiert da drüben ?

OK, laut Frank Trollman wurde das Freelancer-Forum komplett geschlossen und Kommunikation läuft wieder über Private Messsages, weil immer noch Information rauskommt, die scheinbar nicht rauskommen sollte. Wie zum Beispiel eine erste Roh-fassung für ein neues Buch oder Auszüge daraus die scheinbar von gleich VIER Personen an Ancient History geschickt wurden.

Welches ihm ja scheinbar nicht nur eine, sondern gleich vier Personen haben zukommen lassen.
Und welches er auch so ziemlich nach Strich und Faden verrissen hat

In Ordnung, es wurde doch nicht komplett geschlossen.
Es wird nur aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach keinen sehr hohen Nutzungsgrad mehr erfahren.
Mindestens Hardy selbst wird das board so gut wie überhaupt nicht mehr verwenden, da er dem Board nicht mehr traut.

Frank's Zusammenfassung:

Zitat

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

Alles anzeigen

Hm, ob die bei Pegasus nicht Lust haben Leute einzustellen, die Lizenz zu holen und den deutschen UND den US Markt zu bedienen?

Ich weiss nicht, ob die das Geld dafür haben.

Peter Tayor hat gesagt, dass Corp Guide und Vice im April 2009 an layout und Editing gingen, kurz nachdem er bei CGL abging. Da fragt man sich schin, wie gut CGL seither gearbeitet hat, wenn Vice so lange brauchte, bis es in den Verkauf kam, und Corp Guide immer noch nicht fertig ist.

Das war auch nicht ganz ernst gemeint. Pegasus macht gut was sie machen, so soll es weiter sein. Bleibt nur zu hoffen dass die nächste Besetzung bei CGL/der nächste Lizenznehmer Material in vernünftiger Qualität produziert...

Mehr von Frank: Pointiert, aber einleuchtend.

Zitat

Jason dresses up his productions with some fancy stuff, but basically his output has been very low and not high quality. He quotes his word count, but he's padding that with fiction. Specifically, as a Battletech author (having penned three Battletech novels, including one with Randall Bills in 2006), he was given a single - and not well regarded - Shadowrun book to write. It's a paperback novel, and not a good one. It is - of course - almost as many words as Augmentation. But it's basically fanfiction. Nothing that happens in that book is canon or had to be passed by other shadowrun people. Despite having been written after SR4, it takes place in 2063 and features the lives and times of some throwaway characters that we don't care about and never hear from again. His other major accomplishments are... more fanfiction. He wrote up some fiction inserts for some books. Whoop-de-doo. Someone has to do it of course, but it doesn't really matter who it is. As it happens, he wrote that bit in the SR4A book about the gem that has powers that don't make any sense and aren't replicable in the rules. And some people telling each other stories about the history of the world that are specifically outed as false iside the story. So it's a serious waste of space in the core book. That was 4 pages of completely wasted space that he slipped into the book.

As for his stint as developer, he has had the reigns for almost exactly a year. During that year he has successfully brought out... two books. Dawn of the Artifacts: Dusk (an adventure) and Vice (which was mostly written and developed by Peter Taylor. The next pieces he was supposed to bring out include Corp Guide and Sixth World Almanac. But those books have been in development hell for a long time. Peter Taylor actually sent Corp Guide to layout in April of 2009. It has had an actual fucking birthday in development hell! You want to know why Shadowrun hasn't won any awards in the last year? Because they haven't been releasing books!

Now a good part of that is that there hasn't been money to pay artists, editors, or printers, but also a big part of that is that Jason Hardy hasn't done his job. Like, at all.

Whatever his plans for moving forward were, they were either bad plans or he hasn't implemented them. Because there hasn't been a single book that Jason Hardy developed that has gone to print in the entire year he has been supposedly implementing his plans. It's technical writing. It has a 90 day development cycle. He has had four such cycles and has delivered zero products.

-Frank

Alles anzeigen

Diese ganze Sache ist sehr interessant und verdammt unterhaltsam.

Könnte mir kurz jemand sagen, was dieser Stein ist, der Kräfte hat die keinen Sinn machen?

SR4A Seite 78ff, die Kurzgeschichte "Das Herz Gaias". Der seltsame Smaragd, der Manipulationen anderer MetaMenschen in seiner Umgebung sehr leicht macht. Wobei ich da nicht ganz verstehe, warum der regeltechnisch nicht abzubilden sein. Das Ding gibt einfach pauschal auf magische Weise (Artefakt eben) allen umstehenden Personen Boni auf Lügen und ähnlich gearbeitete Manipulationszauber, fertig.

Das Gerede über einen 90 Tage Entwicklungszyklus ist allerdings wohl Blödsinn. Ich bin nun zwar nicht aus der Branche, aber 90 Tage könnte ich mir gerade so für einen Abenteuerband vorstellen, aber nicht für ein vernünftig gearbeitetes Quellbuch.

Unter der Voraussicht das es "technical written" ist halte ich 90 tage für die DRucklegung schon für gerechtfertigt.

Definiere: Technical written.

Technical Writing: Wiki Definition

"Doc Chaos" schrieb:

SR4A Seite 78ff, die Kurzgeschichte "Das Herz Gaias". Der seltsame Smaragd, der Manipulationen anderer MetaMenschen in seiner Umgebung sehr leicht macht. Wobei ich da nicht ganz verstehe, warum der regeltechnisch nicht abzubilden sein. Das Ding gibt einfach pauschal auf magische Weise (Artefakt eben) allen umstehenden Personen Boni auf Lügen und ähnlich gearbeitete Manipulationszauber, fertig.

Evtl soll es nicht nur das alleine sein. Es könnte ein Artefakt aus der 4. Welt sein, mit allem was dazugehört...
Dennoch hat sich SR seit ich es kennen immer eine Option freigehalten. Einzigartige Verzauberungen sind dafür gedacht. Regelkonform.

Gabs mal wieder was neues?
Der neue Artikel, in dem vom Almanach u dem CorpGuide geschwärmt wird, sollen ja wohl wieder daraufhin deuten, dass alles super läuft...
Verdrehte Konmedien?

Wiederhole die Frage von Dougle. Was gibts neues von der Front? Nach dem heutigen Newseintrag sieht alles gut aus für CGL im Endeffekt, aber täuscht der Eindruck?

Noch nix.

Die Lizenz wurde verlängert, CGL macht erstmal weiter

http://catalystgamelabs.com/20…cense-extension-imminent/

Damit ist aber noch lange nicht alles geklärt !

Hough!
Medizinmann