It's far more convoluted than this.
TSR and Wizards of the Coast were sued dozens of times by people like Dave Arneson (five times), Gary Gygax, and a whole long list of other developers and rules creators. The general practice at TSR was to screw over everyone and they tried.
In 1997 (or there abouts) Atari signed a pretty big agreement with Wizards of the Coast for all new D&D Games on all electronic media. There were threats of lawsuits from the beginning, on all sides.
Atari started looking for a partner almost immediately for an MMORPG, several companies declined before Turbine stepped up in late 2002.
Eberron was chosen in part because it was the "ONLY" active campaign setting back in 2002 that wasn't a part of some civil case or potential civil case. It was the first Hasbro owned in its entirety campaign setting due to the sale agreement between Keith Baker and WOTC/Hasbro.
It also was clearly different than the two games already (or nearly ready) in both Everquest and World of Warcraft both viewed as the big boys (even though WOW hadn't been released yet).
Hasbro has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (millions maybe) to settle up the shift business dealings of WOTC and TSR to bring people like Dave, Gary, Ed Greenwood, Margret Weis, and RA Salvator and dozens of others back into the fold. Hasbro didn't have to do this, but they thought it was best for business in the long run. by 2005 virtually everyone was back in the fold, but that wasn't the case in 2002.
I am fairly certain that Hasbro would never have signed the initial agreement with Atari back in 1997, but WOTC was selling everything they could potentially sell as they were bleed cash faster than MTG could make it. Many of these deals are now expiring.
Due to the way the 1997 deal was structured Atari had right of first refusal to get a new deal done with Hasbro in 2007. The new deal for 10 years expires in April 2017.
Atari and Turbine had a very rocky relationship from the very beginning. Judith Hoffman (The original Executive Producer) has occasionally commented about the circle jerk that was getting anything approved. I have heard one former Producer suggest that Atari's active hand in development probably doubled the cost of the game and reduced it original quality by 1/2.
Case in point the auction house. Turbine could not put new functionality into the auction house because Atari declined to approve the time spent on it. Thus while many games were getting more functionality we have been stuck with the same basic AH for nearly 9 years.
Atari was purchased outright in 2008 by Infogrames (The French Company) which was hiding millions in losses.
Infogrames went bankrupt, tried to sell off its holding and the latest incarnation of Atari SA was created. Due to violations in the licensing agreement Atari lost the rights to the games except for the games that were active or in development.
Turbine signed a new non-exclusive deal with WotC back in 2011. The new deal for a minimum of 10 years with options on both sides for another 5.
Turbine which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Warner Brothers also is an issue. Sweatpea Entertainment controlled the Movie Rights to D&D, has entered into an agreement to sell the rights to WB. Hasbro seeing the ability to make millions in selling those rights (to Universal) sued Sweatpea to get the rights back. The trial ended in September of last year with the judge highly suggesting that all parties work out an agreement before he rules (he hasn't as of today).
As far as I know PWE deal still expires in 2017.
Flav wrote on Mar 3
rd, 2015 at 1:39pm:
The whole issue is that for ADD 3 ( and 3.5 ) the support setting was to be Eberron, and just Eberron... FR and the rest were to be scrapped ( or at least left to rot in ADD2 )...
But the outcry of all the PnP people was so heavy that they had to show bring some FR ( and a few Greyhawk ) stuff...while making sure all the other setting stayed in the graveyard by muddling up the IPs a bit more ( which allowed to Wiess and Hickman to do some Dragonlance Stuff, Blackmoor to be edited under D20 and so on ).
Then Hasbro tookover, and the suits there wanted a game easy to transform into an MMO or a console game with easy stuff...Thus came the Bastard Child called 4th Ed.
With Hasbro came money, that secured having Salvatore around, and thus the setting shifted again and was put back on Faerun.
To help secure more revenue, this new set of rules had to have a computer game as well, and lo behold there's that nice NWN IP that made lots of money...
Lets do a 4th Edition computer game... If you remember originally 4th Ed wasn't meant to be a MMO... People would meet in a lobby, form parties there and go adventuring in potentially player made dungeons.
Then the Atari debacle comes in... Atari buys Cryptic, then sell it to PWE when they gets nailed by all their stupid management choices...
Along the way they make the move to sell the Distribution Branch in Europe to Namco... basically asking for Hasbro licenced games to be sold by Namco...
that's a big No No for Hasbro... Said games not being advertized as they should ( really the DDO communication campaign at launch in Europe was pathetic ).
In the end Atari lost the license, Turbine had to settle an agreement with Wizards to keep DDO going, Atari sold Cryptic and NWO to PWE that promptly rebuilt the game using their in house MMO system changing it to a multiplay cooperative game into a full fledged MMO, while dropping everything D&D except the name and the setting. ( and some fluff in char development )
When the dust settle you have
- DDO, that's based on ADD 3.5 and Eberron... A game full of could have been, but that's 9 years old.
- NWO, that's based on D&D 4 and Neverwinter... 4th Ed is not really D&D and the bad sales proves it... ( as long as the fact that it took them quite a while to bring 5th Ed to actually fix the issue )... A game that has been completely rebuilt by PWE when they bought Cryptic, that missed the joint release date of the PnP version due to all legal tangle, and that doesn't really have any appeal to D&D players... And with a Forgotten Realms broken ( once again... remember Times of trouble ) to fit yet another system change....
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D&D & Atari (Read 12018 times)
