Yesterday, Palladium® Games owner made a plea to help keep
his company alive. Apparently they have fallen on financial hard times and they
are asking people to buy a $50 print to help put a Band-Aid® on the bleeding.
Personally I’m of the opinion that if you make mistakes that you could have
avoided then you should pay the consequences. Apparently the biggest chunk of
the financial problem stems from a theft that happened several months ago, they
claim in the tune of $800k-1.3 million. Theft sucks, but if it was such a
valuable commodity then whey wasn’t insurance taken out on the stuff? Other
parts of the so-called problem include no revenue flow from RIFTS® Promise of
Power® for the Nokia® N-Gage®. The delay of the RIFTS® movie was also cited, as
well as a general decline in RPG sales. These and other excuses relied on
revenue they weren’t guaranteed to receive… we all know the phrase… Don’t count
your chickens before they hatch, apparently Kevin® has been doing a lot of
chicken counting.
Along the way Kevin® has alienated a large chunk of his fan
base, by failing to publish books as promised while ignoring other Palladium®
titles. They failed to properly playtest their games. Editing was atrocious,
and paste up was done by hand (usually consisting of text blocks pulled out of
other books, typos and all), while everyone else had moved on to computer
layout making his product look old and outdated. Speaking of old and out dated
the Palladium® system has been begging for a revamp for the last 10 years. By
his own admission, Palladium® games started out as a heavily house ruled
D&D campaign and in the beginning was fun, but eventually became a
discombobulated mess. Then there is Palladium’s® insane enforcement of their IP
which resulted in sending cease and desist letters out to people who were doing
nothing more than promoting Palladium® (Kevin® you can’t copyright a game system)
I for one am split about the whole situation. On one
hand Palladium® provides a source of entertainment for its fans and detractors
alike (as in point and laugh), but on the other hand several companies that I
have liked have gone by the wayside. It’s survival of the fittest, and those
that refuse to adapt, become dead.
