... but you really can't win, can you?
Andreas Gustafsson:
> I for one think it feels a little bit strange having to pay to be able to
> "play with the big boys", whatever the GTA material is about.
>
> There are gaming companies ou there that share very freely and thereby
> create a very warm community feeling.
>
> If you make the fans pay to belong to a special group, you necessarily divide
> the fans in a "has got" and a "hasn't got" group. I hate that kind of business
> practices. But if Greg and Issaries is doing it that way, and want to thank
> people for contributing to the company, sure think. Let him do it.
First Greg gets flak for giving away too much stuff for free on the web; now he gets it in (the other side of) the neck for not giving _everything_ free on the web. I don't know if that ought to make him feel comforted he's steering a sensible Middle Way, or just like he's getting beat up from both wings simultaneously.
I don't see where this "play with the big boys" comment comes from. You seem to be saying that regardless of what's on the GTA site, you feel deprived of a warm fuzzy feeling for not being able to peruse it for free. Would it be "OK" if instead it were printed as another set of spiral bound pre-pub miscellanea (to which I think you might usefully compare it in many cases, if not yet more "pre-"), or would you still complain about that as an elitist and divisive distribution medium if it required payment, and you weren't able or willing to provide same?
> I for one think the quality of glorantha material have deterioated since
> Issaries started publishing. The fanzine material was far better, and even
> though it's beginning to change I don't feel like betting one cent on the
> GTA, since I'd rather pu those money (if I had them) on a subscription
> to tradetalk.
Well, they did say the object of the exercise was to put Glorantha back on a "professionally published footing". Now, no one actually promised that "professional" was actually better than "amateur"...
The two aren't exclusive, though. Tales is folding, not because of I,I, but because David Hall, to say the least understandably, is having to scale back the heroics he's done for Glorantha over the last decade-plus. You won't get people rushing to fill his shoes to lose a ton of money and expend a fearsome amount of time and effort just by complaining about the lack. (And if Unspoken Word fills that void, then we are indeed doubly blessed.)
> Information wants to be free, it's just not sure about how and with whom.
That phrase is normally Greg's trigger to be lured into a defence of the ad hoc mess that are intellectual property laws (which is an unfortunate position to put anyone in, frankly). Let's not confuse this misapplied GPLish thinking with "artistic endeavour is just damn well going to have to learn to love losing money at an even faster rate".
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