Update: Gleemax Games will survive, but be rebranded “Wizards Games.” This is from a former Gleemax VCL, so it’s still not confirmed by official sources.
I just received word from Gamer Zero that Gleemax is going to be discontinued in September.
From his post on the Gleemax Forums:
Wizards of the Coast today announced the decision to discontinue its Gleemax social networking site in order to focus on digital initiatives for core brands Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons.
“We have the two best games in the world,” said Randy Buehler, VP of Digital Games for Wizards of the Coast, “we need to take care of them before expanding into new digital arenas.”
Redirecting development resources accelerates the completion of new features and functionality for D&D Insider and Magic Online III.
“Wizards still believes in the vision for a social networking site dedicated to hobby gamers,” said Buehler. “We will continue to strive towards that vision through wizards.com.”
There’s a more detailed explanation over at Randy Buehler’s blog.
I think this is a sad day, not because of what Gleemax was but what it could have been with the resources of Wizards of the Coast behind it. They put a lot of money into the social networking site, including hiring a ton of technical staff. Here’s hoping they can all find homes within the company and that a big round of layoffs isn’t coming with this announcement.
Good luck to all those who worked on Gleemax, wherever the future finds you!
4:17 pm on July 28th, 2008 1
I’m not surprised, but I’m not happy. Kind-of a bummer.
5:41 pm on July 28th, 2008 2
I know, Ed. It seemed foregonem, but I still hope plenty of people don’t lose their jobs, especially all the new hires from the past year. It would really suck to get the dream job and then lose it almost right away. I’ve seen that happen to people at Wizards before, and I feel their pain.
4:21 am on July 30th, 2008 3
I don’t think they hired anyone new for the Gleemax project as everything else was delayed because of it. They spent money on hardware and time developing it, but that caused so many delays in DDI, MTGO v3, and the forums that were the backbone of Gleemax was neglected.
They may have hired one person to manage the project, but the technical staff was not increased, and shortly AFTER Gleemax came about, they even fired personnel that were forums moderators if people remember that.
So what Gleemax really did was reduce staff and cost a lot of money for something that can be had on other forums like http://www.GaiaOnline.com that is an anime and gaming site, or any of the various other forums existing or the two big social networking sites that allow you to create your own groups for anything.
I mean “Home for gamers” sounds good, but did they really expect their competitor to pay them money to advertise of house games on their site?
Hopefully Gleemax will not return and the moeny wasted will onyl be a one time loss, and they wasted efforts can be put into the other massive projects they have to prevent even more delays with the problems with MTGO, and complete stalling of D&D Insider.
10:44 pm on August 2nd, 2008 4
[...] & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering in: roleplaying So, in my last post I talked about the sad demise of Gleemax and now I also find out that WotC’s publishing arm is contracting in order to focus on the [...]
9:49 pm on August 4th, 2008 5
[...] 4, 2008 in Roleplaying With the demise of Gleemax, documented also here and here, a bunch of folks got together and created the RPG Bloggers Network. I thought, hey, why not? I [...]
11:44 pm on August 4th, 2008 6
pfffff. When are they going to pull the plug on D&D 4e and the D&D Insider game table? Or how about pulling the plug on the communities attitudes? How many times do you go over there and read posts from community telling Wizards of the Coast how shitty they are? I read a lot of them.
Gleemax was a good idea, but they had dupes with crap attitudes working on it for free. In my opinion, asking the community to labor for no money, and then issuing a ToU that grants “co-ownership” of all of their posts, attempting to monopolize the VTT market when they could have just adopted, creating a product that I don’t see many people playing, into etc of how else they messed up, really spells disaster for Wizards of the Coast.
Also, IMO, the problem isn’t Wizards of the Coast so much as it’s their regular forum goers who have an air of superiority, constantly break the ToU and get away with it, outright Gang Bang forums and threads and users, steal, and pretty much think they rule the multi-verse.
8:31 am on August 23rd, 2008 7
Good riddance to bad rubbish. WotC made some truly terrible decisions when they implemented this tripe. For one thing, many well-liked moderators were dismissed, simply for living outside of the US. Others were sacked for revealing too much information to the community, and moderators were shuffled around so that relations with the community were less personal. The ones who were left were stripped of their powers, which were handed over to the incompetent community management team.
Threads that should have been locked within minutes sometimes remained on the forum for weeks. Moderators were required to respond to the threads and explain what actions they had recommended to CM, so users could see from the post dates exactly how long it took CM to get its arse in gear. Also, “Gamer Zero” did a poor job of dealing with the community.
Gleemax itself was poorly done. Despite issues that the community had with the name and revolting colour-scheme, Wizards pushed ahead anyway. Wizards forced everyone on its traditional boards to migrate their accounts, resulting in yet more aggrevation. Some accounts became lost because of this.
The Gleemax failboat has finally been sunk, and not before time.
9:36 pm on August 29th, 2008 8
[...] this point, it’s pretty old news that Wizard of the Coast’s Gleemax is dead. (My excuse? I don’t do news; I do commentary.) At least, Gleemax will be dead in [...]