According to ICv2, Rackham has extended their relaunch plans by a few months (ignoring the fact that they were never particularly specific if any of these plans applied outside of France…), pushing wave 10 out to May and wave 11 out to June. Rackham says they are using this time to add new staff for marketing, communications and community – which is good since their website is still woefully out of date, there’s no information when certain factions will be released and there’s been absolutely no notice of how they intend on fixing the distribution and support problems they’ve had in the US. Not that I’m bitter. For those who don’t remember, Rackham launched a sci-fi, pre-painted plastic miniature game (AT-43), switched their flagship product (Confrontation) to pre-painted plastic, had crappy distribution, outsourced distribution to Fantasy Flight, filed for bankruptcy, took it back from Fantasy Flight and then reformed as Rackham Entertainment. And you thought your favorite soap opera was complicated…  

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Fantasy Flight Games has canceled any further development on its Mutant Chronicles line, citing poor sales. They’re open to selling off the rights to the product line.

They have a few unreleased figures available at a low price, including some goodies and promos. And plans for future releases will be available as free downloadable PDFs.

(source)

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In response to WotC’s yanking of all of their PDF products – in response to a few cases of infringement – a number of other RPG companies are jumping to publicize their own PDF products by offering discounts, as well as a few digs at WotC.

• White Wolf announced a 10% discount on its PDF products. (source)
• Spycraft announces a 20% discount. (source)
• Rogue Games offers its PDF products for free to purchasers of the hard products, and low prices on its PDF products otherwise. (source)
• Paizo Pathfinder PDFs at 35% off. (source)

All of them reassure their cutomers that they have no plans to remove their PDFs any time soon.

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The game real estate market is now a victim of the economic slump, along with the actual real estate market.

Hasbro, citing the depressed economy, has cancelled the Monopoly qualifying games in Ireland. Wonder if Hasbro will be following suit in other countries

(source)

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Following a sudden move to hospital, and some erroneous speculative rumors, Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has died. (source)

Arneson also created the Blackmoor campaign setting, many modules, and work on numerous electronic games.

He will be missed.

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