Valley/Radiant Games -- Up Front Fiasco

Disingenuous at best.

boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/14873/stateme...t-gaming-on-up-front

It wasn't written by Martin, it wasn't endorsed by Martin, and it was a valid news story from a publisher on a hot topic.

"At the bottom, to be fair and balanced, Eric added a disclaimer:
Editor's note: Given the current situation with Valley Games, Radiant Gaming, Up Front, Phil Sauer, and their overlapping circles of activity both in the courts and elsewhere, I invited Rik Falch to make a statement about the current situation with that game and about both companies involved in its production. Sauer summarizes his situation in this post on BGG."

www.boardgamegeek.com/article/10518612#10518612

The thing about BGG News that it isn't really the reporting style of "news". It's more or less a collection of Designer Diaries and Press Releases. It has about as much real news as Skymall catalog.

That being said, there isn't a lot of real interesting board game news to begin with. If you don't talk about new releases and designers then there isn't much else.

The problem I saw with the Radiant Games statement in BGG News is that when real board game news was happening, BGG News wasn't interested in reporting on Phil's allegations and/or their potential merit in any detail; instead they chose to run another company line.

Msample and Bull are pretty on the mark.

I think I'm just going to have to disagree, because inviting one party to make a statement on the main page news feed and banning the other party (I don't know the reasons behind the ban) sure sounds like taking sides to me.

It's OK to disagree. I'm not saying it's right, not one bit. I'm saying I understand that they're attempting to protect what they feel are their interests.

Again, don't shit where you eat.

The front page "news" article was BGG giving open forum to Radiavalley to publicly dispute allegations, and the editorial commentary gave Phil open forum to speak his piece on it.

Phil got banned because he couldn't keep his cool - it was his vitriol that got him banned. He has to feel like shit over it, because honestly, he has to be piss mad about how Radiant was pretty obviously formed to get around Kickstarter's requirement that suits are disclosed.

The whole thing stinks.

Gary Sax wrote: BGG=business. That's been trotted out here a million times and it's still true---it doesn't necessarily mean BGG sucks or anything crazy negative about them. They side with their business partners first and foremost. That makes good sense to me, at least. Again, it's just the commonly shared attitude among BGG's users that it isn't a business because they know the name and avatar of the owner which makes any of this in any way confusing. And the fact they accept no strings attached "support!"

But if they are obfuscating facts and about certain things, wouldn't that make them a party as well?

Bull Nakano wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: BGG=business. That's been trotted out here a million times and it's still true---it doesn't necessarily mean BGG sucks or anything crazy negative about them. They side with their business partners first and foremost. That makes good sense to me, at least. Again, it's just the commonly shared attitude among BGG's users that it isn't a business because they know the name and avatar of the owner which makes any of this in any way confusing. And the fact they accept no strings attached "support!"

It doesn't make sense to me in that they're the biggest name in board gaming, they ought to be the first to call out garbage like this, not post editorials of some crook who at that point had been ruled against in court as having not repayed hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's irresponsible.

They really have no positive incentive for calling out their advertisers. They may be the biggest online thing with regard to boardgaming, but they're still a for-profit business that relies on those advertisers (along with donations) to keep it afloat. The publishers can ask for anything relating to their games to be removed from the database [which I seem to recall happeneing a couple of years ago with Street Soccer]. The best example of how treatment of advertisers and non-advertisers compares is to look at the crap John Bohrer took for using a Geeklist to advertise reprints of Winsome games along with his subsequent banning. I'm not particularly fond of Bohrer's online persona, but his relationship with BGG appears to have terminated over off-BGG behavior (a frothing, ridiculously over the top exchange with a BGG 'name gamer'-type regular, IRC) and failure to buy an advertising slot. That's kind of a far-cry from the way this long-running soap opera between Sauer and Valley/Radiant has been handled.

Edit: Ah, I see Pete covered this later on in the thread. I shoulda started at the end and worked backwards