Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Commentary”
Frank Beckles lives in Augusta Georgia and, after giving an interview to a reporter, Tracey McManus, she found out some of what he’d told her was fiction and exaggeration. Since revealing this, Frank has undertaken a campaign of online harassment, slander, and aggression against Ms. McManus that just keeps going on and on.
It has been a little over ten days since the Bestiary of GOP: Grand Ol’ Predators was released and the response was about what I expected. It’s a niche product within a niche market, and a humour product to boot, so I didn’t expect it to turn over huge numbers (although it probably would have done better if the GOP candidates had kept their primary running as a race a bit longer.)
One of the things that constantly comes up in discussion of the RPG industry, especially with regards to its future, is the Wizards of the Coast market research survey of 2000. Whenever I see this pop up in such conversations, I’m compelled to point out how unreliable this particular study is and then need to explain why. Frankly, I’m tired of having to type the same thing over and over so I’m going to summarize the issues here so they can merely be referenced in the future.
As anyone in this industry will tell you, gamers are full of opinions — sometimes they will rave about your products and sometimes they want nothing better than to tear a strip off of you. While the former are always a nice thing to hear, the latter are par for the course. Sometimes we mess something up and deserve criticism and, of course, there is the fact that you simply can’t please everyone all the time. Criticism that ranges from the polite to outright threatening are a part of doing business, more so the more accessible you make yourself to the public. So, although surprised to see this email, it’s not the sort of thing that I’ve never heard of before. Figuring I should at least see what I did wrong, I sent a reply asking as much. The former customer was online at the same time, so a quick back and forth quickly followed.
Normally I reserve the Misfit Studios blog for press releases, product announcements, and the like, but occasionally I spice it up (or dumb it down, depending on your point of view) with my personal and professional observations, rants, and so on. Well, in the past few days I was involved in a discussion over on RPG.net that crossed over between both the professional and personal, and so I thought I’d toss it up here for you, the Misfits, to share in.
