The Business: The Dark Lord Gives Up On "Divine Right"

The Supreme Dark Lord, Vox Day, has surrendered hold on Divine Right:

For some reason, it appears that gaming volunteers are reliably less able to get a job done than those who volunteer in various other areas of development, from print books to open source office projects. I was very briefly involved in what was supposed to be a Linux distro dedicated to games, and I have never, ever, observed a more useless horde of worthless gammas, all of whom had multiple, often contradictory, opinions, and none of whom were willing to lift a finger to actually do anything at all. I quit the project three weeks after being given responsibility for overseeing the development of the first demo game for the distro.

Despite being 21 years old, The Battle for Wesnoth is still the flagship for open source game development.

My theory is that those who are actually willing and able to successfully develop games are mostly already doing it on their own, as the thriving independent game scene demonstrates. That leaves a lot of people who very much like the idea of game development, but are more interested in the trappings than in actually dealing with the decidedly less-romantic reality of it. The same is true of those who want to be a writer more than they want to write anything; it was surprising to observe how many of the members of a much-accomplished Minnesota writers’ group of which I briefly was a guest never actually wrote anything at all. However, it’s important to keep in mind that one can’t actually know if one has the ability to do something new until one tries; volunteers must always be respected for being willing to try rather than criticized for an inability to do.

(...)

So, if you want to know why we’re not planning to pursue anything in the game space beyond finishing the ALT-HERO RPG for the backers and possibly licensing various properties to other game companies, now you know why. I’m not blaming anyone but myself here; that experience with the Linux project was 14 years ago, and I should have reached the correct conclusions at the time.

I am not privy to what went on with this project. I am disappointed that this effort is ending in vain, yet I am satisfied that Vox made the right call to pull the plug as soon as failure was certain- not when the rights ran out, something others have done over the decades in both tabletop and electronic media.

Good luck to whomever picks this up, and if you're willing to be pragmatic about it then make a deal to use the cover Vox's team commissioned- it's already done, so save yourself some time and just cut the holder a check for its use.

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Today's also a day for big anniversaries.

Oh, and there may be a new Geek Gab episode at 9pm Central Time tonight.