Last year the Penny-Arcade Expo was a huge experience for me. I had started at Gamervision.com just a few weeks earlier, and I was already being flown away to an amazing gaming convention. It was also several weeks after Gen Con, where Wizards of the Coast had announced D&D 4E, and I was getting a chance to interview Chris Perkins. We went and the interview went great, but one part was a little strange.

You see, it was at PAX that they were really pushing Gleemax, a social networking site for gamers. You might know that Gamervision is, indeed, a social networking site for gamers. GV's EiC Sean and I exchanged glares when Perkins started to explain the ins and outs of the new service - it was like a McDonalds representative interviewing someone about baseball cards only for them to explain that they were going to be starting a buisness called Burger King. Different markets to be sure, but the irony was there.

Well, Gamervision won. Below is Gleemax's Requiem, sung by Wizards of the Coast's Randy Buehler. They are redirecting their manpower towards getting D&D Insider up and running as fast as possible, a noble effort indeed.

Gleemax Farewell
Posted By: randyb, 7/28/2008 10:38:56 AM
Wizards of the Coast has made the decision to pull down its Gleemax social networking site in order to focus on other aspects of our digital initiatives, especially Magic Online and Dungeons & Dragons Insider. We continue to believe that fostering online community is an important part of taking care of our customers, but until we have our games up and running at a quality level we can be proud of, it will be the games themselves that receive the lion’s share of our attention and resources.

Our plan is to shut down Gleemax completely sometime in September. (I can’t give a more exact date because the timing depends on what’s going on with other projects.) To those of you who have posted to Gleemax, I thank you for your contributions over the past year. It is community members like you that made this project worth trying, and it is your efforts and words that gave it heart. You should save your blogs by copying that text somewhere else. Meanwhile, I encourage you to head over to the Wizards forums. The Wizards online community continues to thrive, and there should be lots of fun stuff to talk about over the coming months, including our digital offerings.

That’s the short version. The long version, as you might imagine, is a lot longer. And for me, it’s a lot more personal. I choose to work at Wizards of the Coast because I truly care about the games we make and the gamers we make them for. I come to work each day because I was lucky enough to become a gamer, and I want to make sure the dream is still there for the next guy who comes along.

For me, it’s actually been two different dream lifestyles: For a couple of years in the 90’s, I got to be a professional Magic player. I traveled the world, made some great friends, played what is still (in my opinion) the best strategy game ever made, and I made enough money to pay the bills while doing all of that. I’ve also had the privilege for almost a decade now to make games for a living. Working at Wizards sounds like a dream job to many of our diehard players, and the crazy part is that working at Wizards turns out to really be that dream job. The culture inside the building is an awesome blend of smarts and passion, and most days I can’t imagine a better place to work. I feel that it’s my duty to make sure both the games and the company are in an even better place when the next generation of smart kids comes along. Whether we’re playing D&D around the kitchen table, Friday Night Magic at your local store, or assorted German board games on Tuesday nights at Wizards headquarters, we’re all part of the same shared culture.

Anyway, all of that is what led me to be such a passionate evangelist, pushing to move Wizards in a more digital direction. It remains clear that gamers are moving online and if we’re going to preserve everything that is special about Wizards of the Coast—and the hobby gamer culture in general—then we have to move online too.

The mistake that I made, however, was in trying to push us too far too fast. I still think the vision for Gleemax is awesome: creating a place on the web where hobby gamers (or lifestyle gamers or thinking gamers, or whatever you want to call us) can gather to talk about games, play games, and find people to play games with. But I’ve come to realize that the vision was too ambitious. We’ve made progress down about ten different paths over the past eighteen months, but we haven’t been able to reach the end of any of them yet.

The correct strategy at this point is clear: we need to focus. We’re not going to abandon the vision, but we are going to put large chunks of it on the backburner until we prove that we can succeed at the most important pieces. Those pieces are Magic Online and D&D Insider.

Magic Online “V3” is up and running, but it took us a long time to get here and it’s by no means perfect. We have a lot of ideas about what we can do now to make the game better and we’ll be devoting significant resources in future months and years to doing precisely that.

D&D Insider functionality has started to roll out, but we’re still behind where we wanted to be. In the plus column, Dragon and Dungeon magazines have launched in their new online format, and they seem to be getting rave reviews. The Rules Compendium has also launched – it’s a searchable database that contains all the rules elements from all the 4th Edition books we publish. The magazines and the rules compendium are available now to anyone who signs up for a free trial of D&D Insider. Next up are improvements to those pieces plus beta-testing of the Character Builder, Character Visualizer, Dungeon Builder, and Game Table.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave us with any bandwidth to devote to Gleemax right now. Wizards of the Coast remains committed to online community, but instead of trying to grow a new website for a brand-agnostic community, we need to focus on keeping our own house in order. We have the two best games in the world, and we need to take care of them before expanding into new digital arenas.

Randy Buehler

Vice President of Digital Gaming

Wizards of the Coast

Be sure to check PenandPaperPortal.com for even more RPG news.

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