Chaosium v. Gencon

Biggest news in the gaming world this past week or so has been the spat between Gencon LLC and Chaosium. The situation seems to be resolved even though there's still no official word on what it was about.

First, a history. As far as I can tell the first public airing of this bit of dirty laundry was on 28 Feb. Derek Guder (an employee of Gencon LLC) posted on the Gen Con Community forum about it. The entire thread has since been expunged; I'm pasting quotes gleaned from Google cache.

Unfortunately, we will have to keep all events for Chaosium products on hold until on-going negotiations between Chaosium and Gen Con LLC have been resolved. Events can be submitted, but they will not be marked as “Accepted for Consideration” until everything has been resolved. Badges and hotel arrangements will not be based on these Chaosium events.

This specifically affects any events for Chaosium-published products. It does not affect related games from other publishers (such as Call of Cthulhu d20) or the more general overall Lovecraft mythos.

I apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this may cause. We’re trying to resolve it as quickly as we can. If anyone is at all confused about whether their event will be affected by this hold, please just let me know and I’ll be more than happy to go over it with you.

-- Derek Guder, Gen Con Community Forum, 28 Feb, 10:19 AM

It's not hard to guess what sort of firestorm that created. Speculation was rampant on both YSDC and RPG.net. Dan Harms, author of the Encyclopedia Cthuliana, blogged about it as did various others.

Most of the speculation boiled down to one of two theories:

I don't know about you, but neither of those make much sense to me. If it's the former there are much better ways to go after people with delinquent debts. And the latter? What could Chaosium hope to gain by such a tactic? Better space at the con? Reduction in debt?

Additional quotes from posts by Derek Guder in the same thread:

It is a shame, but unfortunately there's not much that we can do at this point.

Nope. It's not really up to me. Or us, honestly. Sorry I can't give you more details.

By last Friday, people were starting to get nervous about it, myself included. What exactly would I do at a Cthulhu-free Gencon? Someone purporting to be Gen Con LLC president Peter Adkinson (and I have no reason to believe or disbelieve him) posted this on YSDC

I'd love to tell you why, but in this case it would not be professional to do so.

Please suffice it to say that we love Call of Cthulhu and we love the fine folks at Chaosium and we hope that CoC fans will feel welcome coming to our show. But we cannot allow CoC events at Gen Con Indy until certain confidential matters between our companies have been resolved.

In the meantime we are reserving space for CoC events in the hopes that these matters are resolved expediently to both parties' satisfaction.

Respectfully,
Peter D Adkison
CEO, Gen Con LLC

Now that cleared things right up.

Sometime yesterday the situation seems to have gotten resolved. Posts in various places report that the "hold" on Chaosium-related events is no longer in effect. Still no statement as to what the cause was.

To further muddy the waters, here's a post from "Mr. Shiny" who runs a CoC tournament at Gencon year after year.

I will offer no speculation on the recently resolved issue....At no point in time did Chaosium request that its games be removed from events at Gen Con. The temporary hold of Chaosium events originated with Gen Con LLC. I won't state their reasons, not editorialize on their validity. But know that there was never an attempt on Chaosium's part to stop their games from being represented at Gen Con.
-- Mr. Shiny, Gen Con Community Forum, 5 Mar

I don't know Mr. Shiny personally, nor do I know what his relationship is with Chaosium, so I can't comment on the accuracy of his statement in any way. I have to say, though, that he's not exactly equivocal about it.

Derek Guder responded to that post with:

Good point, Mr.Shiny, I'll clear out the thread now that the issue's been resolved. There's no reason to leave the speculation around to confuse the situation and breed foundless rumors.

And look forward to what you have plenned for Cthulhu this year, Don't hesitate to drop me an email or give me a call to coordiante stuff.

The thread that was "cleared out" was the one referenced above were the problems was first aired; it has been deleted from the forum web site. Long before it was deleted the thread was locked, ostensibly because posters refused to refrain from speculating about the cause of the spat. From what I could see before the thread was deleted the admin(s) who locked the thread also censored the speculative posts. Those actions make me very, very suspicious.

So, what does it all mean? Some very bad behaviour on someone's part, but hard to say who. I don't expect to see an official response from either company.