Episode 6: Quote Any Chris Isaak Song

Lots of business to take care of this week. Lots of business. So, let’s get started.

Stop drinking? That was easy.

Asking Jennifer to marry me? That was easy.

Six teeth extracted from my mouth in one day? That was…

Okay, that was tough.

Leave AEG?

The hardest damn thing I’ve ever done in my life.

It’s been a long time coming. About a year now, to be honest. There ain’t a whole lot of money in the game industry (as we’ve talked about before) and I want a house.

I need a job that covers our bills. The gaming industry ain’t it.

That’s Reason One.

Reason Two is a bit harder to talk about. It involves intellectual property and freedom.

Right now, I’ve got two games on the shelf with my name on them (along with a couple of other folks, that is). Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I own them. It means AEG owns them.

Here, let me explain. ORKWORLD is a great way to do it.

Since I announced it a week ago, I’ve been bombarded with requests to help me out with it. I’ve gotten e-mails from artists, writers, artist-writers, playtesters, editors and a mess of other folks who don’t have any skills, they just want to help.

But the fact of the matter is, the less people who work on ORKWORLD, the more money it makes. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? But, it’s a fact. Every new name on the spine means more payroll, means more overhead, means more production costs, means less profit.

Also, if anyone helped out, I’d have to insist that I own their work. After all, it is my sandbox. My toys. I take ‘em home at the end of the day.

ORKWORLD is too small to do it any other way. I’d have to purchase all rights to any work that anyone else does for ORKWORLD.

Now, with an artist, that’s not the case because you can just send back any art they do for you. With a writer, it’s a lot harder. Which words belong to whom? If I edit the words, who do they belong to? What game mechanics are mine and which are yours?

Trust me. I’ve done three of these things. It gets very complicated very quickly.

So. With that in mind, think for a second about 7th Sea.

Sure, it says “Created by John and Jen” on the inside, but it doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to AEG. Why? Because if it belonged to John and Jen, we could pick up our toys and leave whenever we felt like it, leaving AEG in the lurch.

That’s forty other employees left out in the wind ‘cause John got angry and went home.

Consider this as well:

Part of the gaming industry is what we call “swag”. That is, at the end of a show such as Gen-Con or Origins, all the professionals run around with copies of books, looking to trade other professionals for books. It’s a lot of fun to watch.

Now, pretend for a moment that I’m at Gen-Con with my little ORKWORLD book. A whole bunch of folks (I hope) come to my little John Wick booth looking to trade.

Every book I trade is lost profit.

I currently have two financial investors in ORKWORLD.

Every book I trade is money out of their pocket.

Now, think of that in terms of 7th Sea.

We traded something in the neighborhood of 30 books at Gen-Con. Probably more. Every book we traded was money lost to the company. Taken right out of the investor’s pockets.

That means that management had to buy all those books, so the AEG employees who went to the con could trade them. In fact, I bought a whole box of both PGs and GMGs to trade with (two boxes total). Lots of swag this year!

You see what I’m getting at? AEG is a huge company now with investors, all who own a piece of 7th Sea.

I don’t. Why? Because too many investors make the game unprofitable. No profit means no AEG.

So, there’s that. Time for me to own my own intellectual properties.

Now, there wasn’t any screaming, fighting, name-calling or brow beating when I gave my notice. None of that. In fact, someone asked me how I felt about leaving AEG and my response was:

“Quote any Chris Isaak song.”

It breaks my heart to leave.

I love AEG. I love its products. I love the folks there. All of ‘em.

I just had dinner with Rob Vaux last night and plan to again sometime this week (besides, he just got The Matrix on DVD, that scum!). John Zinser has told me that if I need any help with the business end of ORKWORLD, I should give him a call. Dave Williams and DJ Trindle just had a wild party at their bachelor pad and I sat out in their hot tub talking about Ork physiology.

I love everyone at AEG. Even the folks I disagreed with. Even the folks I fought with. Everyone.

But, it’s time for me to do my own stuff. Small stuff. ORKWORLD isn’t going to have the distribution that 7th Sea or L5R do. It won’t be the Next Big Thing From AEG!!! It’ll be a little RPG from a little company (that still needs a name!) from one guy in his upstairs study typing away at a three year old Mac, hoping he can sell five hundred copies so he can pay back his investors.

In the meantime, Jennifer’s going back to school to get her credential and I’ll be getting another job. I’ve already got a whole line of freelance jobs lined up, so you’ll be seeing my name in a lot of products soon — including some stuff from a small company called “Alderac Entertainment Group”.