Catalyst Games Ltd : was passiert da drüben ?

Nein.

Die nächste Runde der Schlammschlacht:

"[url=http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=30381&view=findpost&p=909937 schrieb:

FrankTrollman[/url]"]It is now, I suppose, time to make my eighth post on this subject. Now that the other shoe has dropped and Jennifer Harding has come out with the accusation that Loren Coleman and Randall Bills conspired to falsify earnings reports, we can all well imagine the repercussions that will come from Topps and quite possibly the IRS. But let's talk about the here and now. Now, the company has a month and a half to position itself. And more importantly, the people in the company have a month and a half to maximize their own benefit before the license changes.

Six weeks is actually a long time in the age of digital sales, and while no power on Earth can save CGL from the wrath of Topps as regards falsified royalty reports, that doesn't change the fact that when the license ends different choices made now can leave different people with different amounts of money in their pocket. Here's he short version:

Loren Coleman is not going to get the license back. The company will then have a lot of debts, negative money in actual assets, and no intellectual property. The company will cease to exist. Everyone who has not been paid at that point will not get paid. Everything that is sold from now until closing time will put money into Loren's pocket. The only way anyone is getting paid anything is if they exert actual leverage on the company with real extortion in the form of "You cannot sell this product for X dollars until you pay me Y dollars (where Y is less than X)." Anyone who is not holding out on a product whose remaining sales values in the next six weeks are are estimated to be more than their demanded fees will not see a dime.

A new company will happen. And really quite soon. They will want to get the rights to any new books they can. Thus, Jason Hardy's big push to get new books ready for publication when the company can't even pay to sell the books it has already published makes perfect sense - for Jason Hardy. After all, the more books that are "ready" that have his name on it, the better a bargaining position he will have with the next company.

So let's consider possible actions in this situation:

• Withdraw Copyright/ Maintain Silence Imagine for a moment that you understand the extortion paradigm required to ever get paid for your work at Catalyst. If you want to maximize your personal chances of getting paid, it is in your interest to begin extortion now, and also to minimize the amount other people know about the situation. After all, if two people are extorting on the same project, that increases the "Y" money, but it does not increase the "X" money. That increases the chances that Loren Coleman will simply write the project off and then no one gets paid. So people who personally withdraw copyright and then publicly tell people to "wait and see" and get angry when people release details of the situation can be seen as attempting to maximize their own position. Encouraging silence, confusion, or delays in the general population decreases the number of other freelancers who will go for the extortion option, which reduces their chances of getting paid, but increases the chances of the person advocating silence and personally withdrawing contract. Essentially, they are trying to take money out of the pockets of other freelancers and put it into their own.
  

  
  

• Support the Company There are a number of people under the mistaken understanding that it s somehow "professional" to sit around and wait, and even keep working while a company refuses to pay you your wages. Some of these people even think this will ingratiate them with the new company. This strikes me as naive. The first thing you do when you take over as a new regime is to purge the loyalists of the old regime. Anyone who stood by the old guard while they were stealing from the company is going to be a potential quisling. I understand the thought process - it's just wrong. Those people will not be paid for their old contracts and the new company will get them off the roster as fast as possible.
  

  
  

• Withdraw Copyright/ Go Public Extorting the company is the only way a person is going to get paid. Going public with this fact causes other freelancers to go for the extortion option. This effectively increases the "Y" money while not only leaving the "X" money the same, but also leaving the amount of money actually promised to the person making this decision the same as well. The extra money, if it is paid out at all, merely goes to other writers who are now on the extortion train. However, it's more dangerous even than that, because it also makes the people cutting checks (or not) angry, because it increases the amount of extortion levied against them. This increases the likelihood that the head of the company will simply swallow the loss of X and not pay the writers a dime. Spite is a powerful motivation, and if X and Y are similar, it can easily break a tie. As such, some freelancers may wish to "go public" by releasing information to an uncompromising ideologue like Frank Trollman, who will maintain source confidentiality in the face of torture and will absolutely go public with the information for them. It's the same moral position of trying to maximize the number of people who get paid, but somewhat reduces the chances of personal reprisals against the freelancer.
  

  
  

• Start Working Right Now Not as crazy as it might seem. Remember that books are normally stuck in development hell for a couple months anyway. So while Loren Coleman will never pay a dime for any work being written right now, he's also not going to be in charge of making that decision when the work is actually completed. That choice will be made by the next company coming in, and they are of course going to want to slap down production costs for books that are already ready to print and ship if they possibly can. Of course, you'll be working with scabs who don't know Shadowrun and can't tell on reading whether Shadows of Asia is set before or after Corporate Enclaves - so it's entirely possible that this gamble will fail and the new company will not want these "finished" submissions. It's essentially akin to actually writing a completed draft and using that for your proposal to a publishing company you know nothing about. But as gambles go, it's not as crazy as going to work for an average company on the verge of dissolution. The product being made is a licensed product, and the license will be taken over by a new company, who may want to buy it for the original "contracted" price or some lesser negotiated value.

But it's important to keep things in mind. Every single dollar that freelancers don't extort out of the company by holding up future sales until demands are met is going to be locked into Loren's homestead where it will be inaccessible to bankruptcy recovery. Every single dollar that is demanded in total extortion on a project reduces the cost/benefit equation on that project, and increases the likelihood that paying the extortion on that product will not pay itself off in the remaining time. Every project that is canceled outright, reduces the cash flow for this period and reduces the company's ability to pay even those extortions that they want to.

So let's consider something like Sixth World Almanac. If Robert Derie had not pulled his contract, the book would go to print in a couple of weeks. At that point, the small initial print run would get sold and the company would have 30 days to pay Robert Derie before he could withdraw copyright for failure to pay. The company at that point would lose the license and walk away - leaving Robert Derie with nothing and Loren Coleman with some number of thousands of dollars depending upon the initial print run. If he pulls his contract, that doesn't happen, and he can try to make a new contract with the new company in June. But wait! Jason Hardy is the developer. If he can get new writers to rewrite Mr. Derie's pieces, then he can sell the completed work to the new company in June. So you can see how both of them are acting in rational, professional self interest - and also why they are extremely angry at each other, because they are now in direct competition.

You can also understand the anger and vitriol from some of the freelancers at the people who are publicizing this stuff. Especially the ones who understand enough about the situation to be withholding copyright themselves on one or more projects to try to get paid. Attempting to get other people to also stand up for themselves and withhold copyright has a very real chance of making the gambits of the people already withholding copyright fail. It's the only way the people who haven't stood up yet are ever going to see a dime, but it has a chance of zeroing out the demands of the people who already stood up.

Selfishness brings out the ugly in people.

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"[url=http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=30381&view=findpost&p=909995 schrieb:

JM Hardy[/url]"]There are a few things that need to be cleared up here. First, I saw a couple times the claim that the Shadowrun freelancer pool was down to three people. I'm not sure where that number came from. Maybe it was because Peter said something about having six core people, then people subtracted Adam, Jennifer, and Bobby, and got three. But regardless of how that number came to be, it's wrong. There were more than three freelancers in the SR pool after Adam, Jennifer, and Bobby left. Given that freelancers have been targeted by those wishing to discourage them from working with Catalyst, I hope people understand that I won't be offering any more information about who those freelancers are at the moment, though they are always free to speak for themselves.

Second, the amazing thing about Frank's latest post is the underlying assumptions there. Everything is written from the point of view that Catalyst will lose the Shadowrun license. Has Frank overheard conversations between Catalyst management and Topps representatives? Does he know how they went? No. But he makes his assumptions anyway.

Then he continues on making assumptions, many of them based on people sharing his view of the situation. He assumes that I must be doing what I am doing because I am in essence auditioning for whoever the new license holder will be. I wish he would stop trying to suss out my thought process--I have never spoken to him, I don't believe he knows me well if at all, and every time he makes an assumption about what I know and how I'm thinking he's off.

He assumes that no changes have yet been implemented in Catalyst's financial processes; he says things like "Everything that is sold from now until closing time will put money into Loren's pocket", but that is untrue. As Randall's letter mentioned, a document outlining new processes had been sent to owners, and at least some of those processes have now been implemented. Money will go where it is supposed to go.

Frank assumes management wants to keep freelancers quiet so the managers can pocket money. That doesn't explain why part of management spent 12 hours on Friday getting checks ready for freelancers, both those who have been vocal and those who have not. He made his assumption without knowing that fact. This also harms his point that "Extorting the company is the only way a person is going to get paid," since as I said, both freelancers who spoke out and those who did not are going to receive some payment.

He assumes he knows the minds of the "new company" well enough that they will look down upon people who did not act out against Catalyst. How does he know the minds of the people running this company? Will they really ignore a quality freelancer just because that freelancer was discreet?

And there's a common slant to all of his assumptions, namely, that Catalyst will close, a new company will go away, and the freelancers who spoke out will be rewarded. That is the underlying bias in everything Frank presents. I'm not commenting on that bias one way or another except to say that if you're reading Frank's posts, please be aware of that bias. And the fact that he has that bias, plus uses unconfirmed (and/or distorted) information from anonymous sources while claiming to have journalistic integrity makes my degree in journalism shudder. Frank has a good mind and makes interesting points, but they are slanted. What he is doing is many things, but not journalism.

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"[url=http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=30381&view=findpost&p=910006 schrieb:

Synner[/url]"]Actually, the core metaplots of the past twenty years and many of the minor ones were in the process of being documented when I stepped down. Unfortunately the project never got prioritized the way it deserved because there was no assistant developer for most of my run as lead developer and I had too much on my hands as it was.

One of my long-term side-projects, to ease newcomers into freelancing, was a comprehensive Shadowrun Primer, or "setting bible", describing not only the fundamentals of the setting as of SR4A, but also presenting sumarily key metaplots of the past, present and future (as SOP I mapped out metaplots over 3-4 years with a view of integrating books/products as closely as possible with the developing storyline hence Ghost Cartels playing off Runner Havens and Corp Enclaves and then Vice following on the heels of the GC shakeup and the now-unlikely campaign following up on Primeira Vaga and the Dream Seed).

I did a similar 30-page brief to convey for new Shadowrun artists just before SR4A. The SR Primer still isn't complete but it's close to 100 pages long and I do intend to wrap it up. Who knows when it might come in useful.

Hervorhebung durch mich – wer glaubt noch, dass Synners Rückmeldung Zufall ist?