BESM 4th Edition KS
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Hopefully, it gives McKinnon enough assets so he can be sued by all the game writers and artists he screwed over with Guardians of Order. (His last company.) Last I heard, he'd literally conned folks out of an aggregate high six figures/low seven figures amount of cash.
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@Bad-at-Lurking ^^^^^this.
IIRC weren't there people who paid for preorders of Game of Thrones content that lost their money when Guardians disappeared/shut down? I can't remember, but I remember hearing some anger about preorders when it happened.
Delete the Hog Pit. It'll be fun.
I really don't understand He-Man -
@Ghost I know GRRM settled out of court for all the extant copies of the game that GoO had left in their possession and then sold them via his website for a couple of years. I'm not sure if he honored McKinnon's preorders.
I know the only reason BESM 3E customers received anything at all was because White Wolf stepped up and ate the cost of printing and shipping after acquiring the BESM license. (Which they have apparently leased or sold back to him, now.)
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@Bad-at-Lurking What's interesting to me is that Modiphius got V5/WoD from Paradox, and there doesn't seem to be an IP that Modiphius doesnt like printing. They seem to be gobbling up product lines these days and have an existing relationship with Paradox.
So you're probably right that Paradox sold BESM rights back to the original owner. It's probably also right that Modiphus didnt want it OR it's low enough priority of an item that selling the IP back was probably deemed more profitable than attempting to continue the line.
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@Bad-at-Lurking said in BESM 4th Edition KS:
Hopefully, it gives McKinnon enough assets so he can be sued by all the game writers and artists he screwed over with Guardians of Order. (His last company.) Last I heard, he'd literally conned folks out of an aggregate high six figures/low seven figures amount of cash.
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Long story short:
BESM made a fair amount of money and McKinnon got very ambitious with his plans for the company. He started soliciting work (art and text) from many, many big names in the industry at the time (Bruce Baugh, Rebecca Borgstrom and many others) for Silver Age Sentinels and Ex Machina and other games lines, as well as entering into exclusive licencing agreements for the ASOIAF (Game of Thrones) RPG conversion and new editions of Amber and Nobilis, among others. He also entered into distribution agreements with several small game companies (which were really one or two-person shops) and took money from them to distribute their books under the GoO banner.
People handed in their work and didn't get paid. People paid for preorders and no product was forthcoming. Questions started being asked. McKinnon then simply vanished off the Internet. He didn't even give his contracted contributors a 'sorry' email. He just ghosted. The freelancers looked into legal options, but given the relatively small amounts (10k here, 15k there, 30 elsewhere), they were told that the cost of pursuing their money would be more than they'd lost already, with no guarantee that he'd have the assets to pay up when they won.)
The only person who got any traction at all was George RR Martin, who was starting to bask in that filthy fantasy doorstop money was willing to take a loss to get his IP back. He did, along with all the remaining stock of the ASOIAF hardbacks, which he sold on his own website for several years.
On top of that there were the customers who didn't get their preordered and paid content. Since at some point after going radio silent, McKinnon sold the rights to BESM to White Wolf, they made good on HIS back orders of that product and fulfilled printing and shipping on 3rd edition BESM.
The freelancers and 'partners' never saw a dime of that money and it drove a few of them into deeply unpleasant financial straits. Some people were stiffed for literally months of full-time work.
And now the dude is back and his position is that that his old company owned them that money but it's gone (he has not clarified if he actually declared bankruptcy and I am definitely not a lawyer so I'm not even going to pretend to know how that works) so he's not liable. Tough titty, basically.
But GoO and this new company were/are one-man shops with McKinnon as the only company officer. Morally, if not legally (and maybe legally, again, I'm not a lawyer so I have no idea), he's responsible for a truly huge amount of financial loss. Last I heard, between the stiffed freelancers, the missed licencing opportunities and the publishing fees he took knowing he couldn't fulfill his responsibilities, the amount lost was pushing up into the high hundreds of thousands or more.
TL;DR version: Dude is a scamming asshole. His business didn't just fold. He bilked a lot of people out of a lot of cash knowing he couldn't make good on his contracts before it folded.
